200 THE COMPLETE SPORTSMAN 



Briton too often finds the effort of balancing 

 himself on one elbow while he drinks his tea 

 calculated to induce a severe attack of those 

 " pins and needles " to which even the most 

 experienced picnicker is at times prone. 



Under the baneful influence of that modern 

 love of luxury of which we are all the victims, 

 the practice of picking and nicking, which long 

 survived the rigours of our English climate, is at 

 last threatened with extinction. Even sports- 

 men who were once content to recline at midday 

 under a hedge, with a hunk of bread in one hand 

 and the wing of a cold partridge in the other, 

 must nowadays repair for luncheon to some 

 comfortable tent, or to the privacy of a keeper's 

 cottage-parlour. There is every reason to sup- 

 pose that in another twenty years the picnic 

 will take its place beside the hansom-cab and the 

 Greenwich fish-dinner, among the many "links 

 with the past" that supply subjects for news- 

 paper correspondence during the Silly Season. 



4. 



When the days begin to draw in and the 

 light grows too dim to enable the sportsman to 

 indulge in a game of golf later than four o'clock, 

 members of the leisured classes would find the 

 time hang heavy on their hands were it not for 



