PARTRIDGES AND PHEASANTS. 167 



whose pith the natives use for their "rush-lights" mark 

 the limits to which spring freshets rise. This is a sure find. 

 The guns have just got within command of it when a mallard 

 sails out from a floating cress-bed. He gives a look at the 

 gunner on the right, floats round on the stream, glances at 

 the other enemy, and is up into the air with a deal of splash- 

 ing in a second. Two or three others rise and are accounted 

 for very easily, and a bevy of teal may get up or steal away 

 down stream, to be subsequently met with and thinned out 

 as they circle round the gunners. 



There is hardly time for lunch in these short days the 

 man in reasonably good condition ought to be able to walk 

 and shoot all the brief hours the sun is above the horizon 

 with little or no food. However, such exercise in the open 

 air is an undoubted provoker of appetite, and we may sup- 

 pose some sort of lunch is taken, leaning against a gate, 

 perhaps, or seated on a fallen elm log, while the boys put 

 out their game on the short, sharp-nibbled grass by the hedge 

 side in a comely row, and report the total. Then at it again, 

 beating the deep pits for rabbits, the broad hedgerows of 

 blackthorn and briar for outlying pheasants, and picking up 

 a couple or two of wood pigeons going to roost in the copper- 

 trunked firs of the homestead, the sun sinking down meanwhile 

 behind the western pastures, a huge globe of golden flame. 



THE QUAIL POACHER AND THE PARTRIDGE THIEF. 



Just as anthropologists tell us that centuries of experi- 

 ence and toil intervened between the formation of the first 

 smooth simple bone fish-hook, and the perfected instrument 

 of capture armed with its fatal barb, so the learning of the 

 field -and stream has continually taught both savage and 

 civilized races multitudinous and cunning methods whereby 

 the beasts and fishes of forest and flood may be taken for 

 food or other needs. Though this subject lays itself open 

 perhaps to the charge of being one of " poaching," I am by 



