BEGINNING TO SHOOT 117 



wont to cut short the luncheon of bread and cheese 

 and beer, and what zest there was in the wood- 

 cock shilHng sweepstake ! What ardent sportsmen 

 would some of tlie farmers turn out to be, whom 

 ordinarily you might have taken to be men who 

 cared for nought but turnips and dung ! And one 

 did feel so important, so large, as the originator of 

 those shooting-parties, as the general who decided 

 what the strategy should be. Farmers, however, 

 cannot shoot every day ; keepers must be look- 

 ing to their wires, watching poachers, trapping 

 vermin ; gardeners' boys must mainly weed. So 

 that far more often it was a solitary shoot. Nearly 

 always taking with me two light spaniels, far from 

 finely bred dogs, but capital rabbiters, and quite 

 equal to winding and putting up a woodcock or a 

 skulking hen pheasant — the cock birds, particularly 

 the older ones, were inveterate runners in the 

 higher wood — I would choose now the young wood 

 of a few years' growth, now the blackthorn thickets 

 and rows on the common, now the scattered furze- 

 bushes, sometimes even the high wood of from eight 

 or nine to fourteen years' growth, where in those 

 days one generally managed to fall in with a hare 

 or two, which have come to be so scarce latterly in 

 our parts. 



It was on one of these solitary expeditions that 

 I got my first woodcock ; he rose from some 

 dead bracken which had not yet been beaten 

 to the ground by frost and snow of winter : it 

 seemed too good to be true when he fell dead 



