6 PRACTICAL PHEASANT REARING. 



servative member that Merionethshire a few years back 

 unseated an unadvertised man, and unmentioned in 

 the Badminton or any other library, this, but one who 

 can hold his own with the best when it comes to shoot- 

 ing and what prettier " item " can be culled from the 

 programme of sport than to stand behind a workman 

 like this who, apparently unconscious of the fact that 

 he is doing anything out of the common, crumples up 

 one after another of these highfaluting pheasants, at 

 a height up in the air at which ordinary mortals would 

 cry a go say that the Johnny Longtail of the air had 

 the race in hand, and decline any further to compete. 

 Neat work this, my masters neat work ; and we 

 poor wretches who can at best account for only about 

 half our birds, and only half kill half of them, had 

 far better invest in a stick and join the beaters, or a 

 grouse-driving seat, and take a lesson from these past 

 masters of the art of shooting " flying," not so very 

 long ago believed by our forefathers to be an utter 

 impossibility. Would that our respected pregenitors 

 could stand for but half an hour behind such a man 

 as the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, for instance, who 

 gets off his second barrel with such extraordinary 

 rapidity, that it is not at all uncommon to see him 

 with two birds "dead in the air" at the same instant. 

 In a natural state the pheasant rarely lays more 

 than nine eggs, and then commences to sit upon them. 

 It is, I daresay, needless, but, for all that, I intend to 

 impress upon my friend the keeper the most elemen- 



