110 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 



of those two things consisted in a pipe ; and I knew 

 that in walking and shooting, and a pointer (I had 

 but one), few men, if any, could beat me. Bets 

 were talked of, but none made ; and I thought Mr. 

 Mao-niac, who knew something of my proficiences in 

 sport, was highly amused by the wrath my apparent 

 presumption had occasioned in Mr. St. Leger. The 

 day arrived ; I shot at Stevington, and so home by 

 Carlton, with my curious old pointer Don, who cer- 

 tainly was the ugliest and oddest animal that man ever 

 had, and who always sulked in the far end of a tub 

 from the first of February till the first of September. 

 The coming off of the hammer of one barrel of my gun 

 saved a good many birds, as it was some time before 

 a second gun could reach me ; however, before four 

 o'clock, and with lots of scattered birds around me, 

 to kill if I pleased, I left off to go to my kennel, with 

 thirty-one brace of birds, and a hare or two. I believe 

 Mr. St. Leger bagged somewhere about ten brace ; in 

 short, no one who was at that dinner party made any- 

 thing like the bag I did. To show what preservation 

 will do, and the breeding up partridges by hand, I do 

 not think that on the farms round the great woods at 

 Harrold, when I first came, I could have killed two 

 brace of birds. Having bred by hand there, at a 

 tent which I pitched for an under-keeper, where I 

 had previously found no partridges, during the few 

 last years of my stay, I could always, in the earlier 

 part of September, average twenty brace. 



When the harvest was gathered, and riot come 

 home to the covers, the nutting season, and the shoot- 

 ing season, and the fall of the leaf conjoined, these 

 united difficulties in so wide an extent of woodland, 

 entailed at times a lengthened draw before I. could find 

 a fox, and occasioned me much trouble. The immense 



