MARCH 81 



another they are all given wind of the game, as John 

 silently summons each one to take the point in turn; 

 until finally up gets a single old grayhen ! 



In one department of his kennel John was not ex- 

 emplary he never had a decent retriever. He considered 

 the professional retriever useful in covert shooting, especi- 

 ally for hares and rabbits, but he never would employ one 

 with his setters or pointers in the field ; holding that to 

 allow a dog to dash in and grab up fallen game under the 

 very noses which had first discovered it was too sharp a 

 trial to inflict upon his favourites. He hated, therefore, 

 men who brought their own retrievers with them ; for it 

 was his invariable practice, part of his educational system, 

 indeed, to recover dead, and even winged, game with his 

 pointers, and to reward them by allowing them not to 

 mouth it, but to nuzzle it. I have seen a couple of guns 

 go up to a point in a field of high turnips. The birds 

 rose singly, or in twos or threes, and at the end of the 

 fusillade there were seventeen to pick up. Every one was 

 found by, and lifted before, the pointers. 



Of course all this took time, which was reckoned but 

 lightly in the leisurely old muzzle-loading days, though it 

 would be voted intolerable now. I am not drawing any 

 invidious comparison between the modern plan of cam- 

 paign, which marshals an army of beaters with waving 

 flags across a whole countryside and requires nothing of 

 the guns except superior marksmanship, and the older 

 system, under which a couple of sportsmen, accompanied 

 by a head-keeper and two or three assistants, went quietly 

 to work, and so manoeuvred as to land at a convenient 

 hour beside a clear spring to munch their frugal pro- 

 vender. I am prepared to admit that what has been lost 

 F 



