130 HINTS ON GROUSE DRIVING. 



The excellent bags made this season, 1887, at Brom- 

 head have, I notice, this year been published in The 

 Field. I need, therefore, feel no reticence in alluding 

 to the same, although not by any means so remarkable 

 as in former years 1872, for instance, when 1350-^- 

 brace were killed in one day by a party of certainly 

 not as accurate gunners as those who now line the 

 fatal ravine, on either side of which the butts are 

 erected, and up and down the bottom of which, drive 

 after drive, six times during the day you travel as 

 you change your number and your position in 

 readiness for the next affray. For to a rifle en- 

 counter, and to that only, as once witnessed by self 

 and company during the Franco-Prussian war near 

 Mezieres, can I at all liken the tout ensemble of a 

 big Yorkshire drive. Over nine hundred brace have 

 I seen picked up at Bromhead ; and this year, had 

 the wind not been contrariwise, this total would very 

 possibly have been equalled the moor, although 

 probably, for its size, the best in the world, being 

 long and narrow. And should Boreas be rude, as he 

 frequently is in short, as boisterous in the wrong 

 direction as are certain of the Sheffield blades, who 

 tax the energies of the management by their well- 

 meant though occasionally too-pronounced efforts to 

 swell by " self " and " canine " the already plethoric 

 total away go vast packs of birds, heedless of flags, 

 .and shouts, and shot, and screams, over on to the 

 Association moors adjoining, there, alack ! to remain 



