3/6 SPORT IN EUROPE 



paws, and then eye you curiously, and then you shoot them for 

 their impertinence. 



Stay, I know one dafter game than this, and that is rabbit- 

 shooting on a Wiltshire downs warren, as I have experienced it. 

 For some days previous to the big day some poisonous 



fumes were inserted into the rabbits' burrows for the pur- 

 shooting. ^ 



pose of persuading them to stay above ground. Then, 



when all was readv, four ouns walked with the beaters and four went 



forward to a stand. As a rule there was little shootinor till the 



walking division got within about a hundred yards of the standing 



guns, and then the fusilade began. The rabbits, half dazed with 



the fumes of the poisonous mixture stuck into their burrows and 



the shouts of the beaters, sat about like empty bottles in a backyard, 



till bowled over by the bold, unerring sportsman. How on earth 



some of us were not killed. Lord only knows ! Of course, lots of 



beaters got pellets into them, but then it pays for a beater to be 



peppered by the lord of the manor. 



The habits of the duck tribe and the woodcock and the snipe 



are the same all over Europe, and will be familiar to every reader 



of this book ; but there is a quaint form of shooting 

 Snipe. 



the snipe that I used occasionally to go in for. There 



are some flat marshes out Crowland w^ay, some eight miles east of 



Peterborough, all intersected by deep, stagnant drains. Here, in 



certain weather, thousands of snipe take up their abode, but the 



difficulty and quaintness attached to the sport was the leaping of 



the drains with a long pole. Sometimes it stuck in the mud, and 



if you put it too far over and did not spring sufficiently hard to take 



