288 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



For this reason, also, I consider it the duty of the gun 

 always to be up with the dogs, and never to allow them to 

 hunt wide or independent. 



I have seen men pride themselves on being able to sit 

 down on a post of the fence, while their dogs were beating 

 a fifty-acre cornfield, in the idea that, if they should point, 

 it would be easy to get up to them before the game should 

 rise. I have also seen dogs hied in, like foxhounds, to 

 beat heavy coppice or covert, while the shooter walks 

 quietly along the bank, on the look-out to shoot the wood- 

 cock as they top the bushes. This, I submit, is legiti- 

 mate, and beautiful spaniel work, but is utterly ruinous 

 to pointers and setters. 



A friend of mine, and otherwise a good sportsman, 

 once told me with exultation that his setters would beat 

 the heaviest and most impenetrable woodcock cripple, 

 flushing and driving out every bird to him, as he walked 

 along the outside, like spaniels, and yet would hunt stead- 

 ily and point stanchly in the open. He was much aston- 

 ished at my telling him that I did not hold such dogs 

 worth the rope that should hang them. Yet such is my 

 deliberate opinion. 



I do not consider that to bag the most game any how, 

 is the greatest sport, or the object ; but doing it in beauti- 

 ful style, with the animals showing their qualities and per- 

 formance in the highest possible degree ; and to get them 

 to do this, one must occasionally sacrifice a broken-winged 

 bird and lose a fair shot. 



The great injury which accrues to dogs from getting 

 off into the woods alone, and hunting on their own account 



