BRITISH SPORT PAST AND PRESENT 



travelling was slow and expensive, and the Highlands were, 

 comparatively speaking, little known. For a long time after 

 the first shootings were rented, moreover, the Highland land- 

 owner considered it infra dig. to let a moor. 



Here is a characteristic passage from Christopher North, 

 an unconventional votary of what had at this time, 1842, 

 become a fashionable sport : — 



' . . . But let us inspect Brown Bess. Till sixty, we used 

 a single barrel. At seventy we took to a double ; ^ — but 

 dang detonators — we stick to the flint. " Flint," says Colonel 

 Hawker, " shoots strongest into the bird." A percussion-gun 

 is quicker, but flint is fast enough ; and it does, indeed, argue 

 rather a confusion than a rapidity of ideas, to find fault with 

 lightning for being too slow. With respect to the flash in the 

 pan, it is but a fair warning to ducks, for example, to dive if 

 they can, and get out of the way of mischief. It is giving 

 birds a chance for their lives, and is it not ungenerous to grudge 

 it ? When our gun goes to our shoulder, that chance is but 

 small ; for with double-barrel Brown Bess, it is but a word and 

 a blow, — the blow first, and long before you could say Jack 

 Robinson, the garcock plays thud on the heather. But we beg 

 leave to set the question at rest for ever by one single clencher. 

 We have killed fifty birds — grouse — at fifty successive shots 

 — one bird only to the shot. And mind, not mere pouts — 

 cheepers — for we are no chicken-butchers — but all thumpers — - 

 cocks and hens as big as their parents, and the parents them- 

 selves likewise ; not one of which fell out of hounds (to borrow 

 a phrase from the somewhat silly though skilful pastime of 

 pigeon-shooting), except one that suddenly soared halfway 

 up to the moon, and then 



' Into such strange vagaries fell 

 As he would dance,'' 



and tumbled down stone-dead into a loch. Now, what more 



' Professor John Wilson was born in 1786 ; he was therefore about fifty-seven years 

 old when this was written. He died in 1854.— (DiW. of Nat. Biography.) 



88 



