250 GUN, RIFLE, AND HOUND. 



certain class of newspapers of what they but no one 

 else term the battue. It is really too amusing to 

 read the diatribes they publish against " feather-bed 

 sportsmen" and "farm-yard game." I should like to 

 take one or two of them to a place I know and where 

 I often shoot. It is a grassy valley only about some 

 eighty yards wide. The wood runs half-way down 

 the hill, which here projects like a step, and then falls 

 almost perpendicularly. On its outer edge grow a 

 row of ancient oaks. Qver these the birds come 

 surging down the wind, the guns being posted by 

 the streamlet in the bottom. Small wonder they 

 speak of the birds as "the highest I ever saw." It 

 is obvious that they can only just be within the 

 extreme range of a shot-gun, and that therefore unless 

 fairly hit in the head or breast, there is no chance of 

 stopping them. Yet I have seen men "dragging them 

 down " one after another, with the regularity of a 

 machine. I should like to place some of the above- 

 mentioned newspaper critics in the line of guns here, 

 and lay a good bet that they would not in the whole 

 beat touch as much as a tail-feather. 



No ; if there is any time when an old cock 

 pheasant does present any resemblance to a barndoor 

 fowl, it is when he flutters up aimlessly out of a 

 bramble-bush or a patch of late corn. Yet this is 

 what our critic would call shooting him " in the old- 

 fashioned sportsmanlike way." Why, it should be 

 any odds on a flintlock musket of the last century ! 



Nevertheless, I need hardly turn over one of the 

 old diaries (of which I have, alas ! an accumulating 



