A "DRIFT OF WILD FOWL" 257 



vibrates. It is alive with the whirring of their 

 wings. You see them clearly for a moment or two, 

 as they speed on in the bright moonlight. This 

 time, you single out your birds ; there is a double 

 flash and a double bang, and then, a double heavy 

 lifeless thud in the water, some thirty yards away, 

 tells you that, this time, you have struck home, 

 and your trusty and much-enduring water spaniel 

 soon deposits a pair of wild ducks again a mallard 

 and his mate at your feet, and you feel that your 

 patience is more than rewarded. 



To pass from the genuine sport involved in a 

 successful or unsuccessful stalk or "stand," to a 

 description of the wholesale massacres perpetrated 

 on the lakes of Mexico by Indians, who, with the 

 help of a masked battery of two tiers of guns, 

 manage, it is said, sometimes to kill twelve hundred 

 ducks at a single discharge ; or of the smaller but 

 still considerable slaughter of the decoys, which, 

 though they are much less common in this country 

 than they were, are still to be found in various 

 parts of it, and still send thousands of birds 

 annually to the London market, would probably 

 be felt to be too violent a transition, too great a 

 come-down from that on which I have just dwelt with 



pleasure. Moreover, the process of constructing 



R 



