2 HAPPY HUNTING-GEOUNDS 



first sparrow I bagged with my own gun, or the 

 gudgeon which took my exceedingly early worm at 

 Henley-on-Thames in the fifties may have produced 

 in my breast a "fine careless rapture" that I could 

 not quite " recapture " when in later days I landed a 

 twenty-pound salmon or grassed a ten pointer, but 

 such memories are for myself alone. Nor shall I go 

 back to my schoolboy days in Sussex, although then 

 the heathery sides of Blackdown were still untouched 

 by the speculative builder, and the combe where we 

 lived was sixteen miles from Godalming, the nearest 

 railway station. Black-game were still to be found 

 there, and I remember my eldest brother returning in 

 triumph from a solitary ramble, with a fat grey hen 

 which he had succeeded in bagging with the little 

 sixteen bore by Egg, which passed shortly afterwards 

 into my hands, and acquired a capacity for missing it 

 had not displayed in the hands of its former owner. 



My father entrusted us all with a gun very early, 

 but made and enforced very definite rules as to its use. 

 In the first place, the muzzle must never be pointed at 

 anyone. " Loaded or unloaded it may go off." Then 

 no bird or beast was to be shot at unless it was either 

 destructive, or good for food ; and all game birds were 

 strictly tabooed until we became the proud possessors 

 of game licences. He always inculcated what would 

 now be considered a quixotic reverence for law and 

 order. He considered smuggling a breach of the 

 eighth commandment, and would never even import a 

 Tauchnitz novel when returning from one of his rare 

 visits to the Continent, as he held that by so doing 

 he was defrauding the authors. For a gentleman to 

 shoot game without a licence he considered doubly 



