FIRST LESSON IN AUTUMN CONTINUED. 5ol 



or furrows, for he will but too naturally follow them 

 instead of paying attention to his true beat. Have you 

 never, in low lands, seen a young dog running down a 

 potato or turnip trench, out of which his master, after 

 much labor, had no sooner extracted him than he 

 dropped into the adjacent one ? It is the absence of 

 artificial tracks which makes the range of nearly all dogs 

 well broken on the moors, so much truer than that of 

 dogs hunted on cultivated lands. 



143. Moreover, in turnips, potatoes, clover, and the 

 like thick shelter, birds will generally permit a dog to 

 approach so closely, that if he is much accustomed to 

 hunt such places, he will be sure to acquire the evil habit 

 of pressing too near his game when finding on the 

 stubbles instead of being startled as it were into an 

 instantaneous stop the moment he first winds game, and 

 thus raise many a bird out of gun-shot that a cautious 

 dog one who slackens his pace the instant he judges 

 that he is beating a likely spot would not have alarmed. 



144. " A cautious dog ! " Can there well be a more 

 flattering epithet ? * Such a dog can hardly travel too 

 fastf in a tolerably open country, where there is not 



* Provided always he be not perpetually pointing, as occasionally 

 will happen and is the more likely to happen if he has been 

 injudiciously taught as a puppy to set chickens, and has thereby 

 acquired the evil habit of " standing by eye ; " which, however, 

 may have made him a first-rate hand at pointing crows. 



f With the understanding that the pace does not make him 

 * shut up " before the day is over. 



