WHITEADDER AND LAUDERDALE 



friend, if not unique in the curiously conflicting nature 

 of his sporting endowments, was most assuredly so in 

 one particular achievement of his life. I do not 

 believe that another man ever lived who, from boy- 

 hood to the close of his life, which in this case ended 

 at forty-six, kept a strict account of every single day's 

 hunting, shooting, and fishing. And this, too, in the 

 case of a modest stay-at-home Irish country gentle- 

 man, who followed all these pursuits assiduously and 

 above all hated writing ! I regard this, for some 

 years in my possession, as in its way the most curious 

 document of the kind in existence not for the informa- 

 tion it contains, for it is merely a record of little 

 more than bare figures but it is all enclosed in a 

 single fat manuscript book, the early pages of which 

 were quite faded and yellow, while the last were still 

 being written. What is more, on its title-page was 

 the boyish scrawl with which so many of us at that 

 callow period have commenced a diary of some sort 

 with the best of intentions, that may have lasted six 



months ! This one was entitled, ' J H T , 



His Sporting Diary, 1865.' It began with hunting days 

 on a pony, shooting exploits with a single barrel, and 

 trouting in the home streams, and plodded on 

 methodically without a break for thirty years, un- 

 clouded by a single spell of illness, and ending with a 

 pathetic entry, because so utterly unconscious at the 

 moment of writing of what it meant. ' Sept. 20 [the 

 opening day, then, of Irish partridge shooting] : Shoot- 

 ing with B [myself]. Felt seedy ; went home 



midday.' This was the last word, the end of every- 

 thing, the sudden and early break-up of an apparently 



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