252 A MEDLEY OF SPORT 



good things of the breakfast table, we started off 

 to slay. 



The single-handed keeper, accompanied by half-a- 

 score bronzed and grinning yokels, who were to act as 

 beaters and game carriers, and a team of handsome and 

 well -broken field spaniels, was waiting for the appearance 

 of the guns at the gate of the first enclosure to be worked 

 — a big field of rough grass, which almost invariably held 

 its full complement of partridges, hares, and rabbits. 



First blood fell to the lot of D , who rolled over a 



well- grown leveret just as she was disappearing into a 

 thick belt of bramble scrub growing on the banks of a 

 small brook or feeder of the river. At the report of 



D 's gun, a covey of seven partridges rose wild and 



far out of shot of either of us. Then a second and bigger 

 lot got up at a greater distance still, and I, for one, began 

 to think that driving would have been by far the most 

 satisfactory manner of dealing with the little brown birds, 

 notwithstanding the keeper's avouchment of " ne'er a 

 partridge hevin' been pulled at during the whole of 

 the season." 



My position of outside left-hand gun led me past a 

 small pond-hole, from which, with a great to-do, four teal 

 sprang within a dozen yards of me, and away they flashed, 

 twisting and turning in their flight as only these merry 

 little duck know how to twist and turn. Holding, as I 

 believed, well before one of the teal as it passed left- 

 handed, I pulled, but, apparently, missed clean, and only 

 succeeded in stopping one of the " spring " with a wing 



