MASSACRE OF INNOCENTS 247 



But her maternal anxieties do not cease when 

 the river is reached ; for it is some four weeks 

 before the ducklings are able to flap, and it is as 

 much again before the flappers are able to fly. 

 And then comes the fatal first of August or, as it is, 

 happily, in some counties now, the first of September 

 when, at the earliest dawn of day, keepers and 

 dogs, farmers and squires, and every one who has 

 the right to handle a gun, and very many who 

 have not, make a combined onslaught upon them. 

 The beginning of the duck-shooting season 

 though the present state of things is a great 

 improvement on the old, when no protection at 

 all was afforded to the helpless flappers has, 

 surely, been fixed by the magistrates, in many 

 counties at least, a month too soon. Many of the 

 late broods can only half fly, or cannot fly at all. 

 The mother, in her care for her young, always falls 

 the first victim ; the birds have not yet been 

 "stubbling," and are therefore hardly worth the 

 eating ; they have hardly a chance of escape. This, 

 surely, is a negation of all true sport. It is a 

 massacre of the innocents Rachel perishing with 

 her children " a slaughter of water-rats," as 

 Colonel Hawker, the great authority on wild-fowl 

 shooting, once expressed it, rather than the manly 



