284 WILD GOOSE SHOOTING. 



stranger in that loch but belonging to some myste- 

 rious land in another hemisphere, whose coast ships 

 have been known to visit, driving under bare poles 

 through a month's snow-storms, was an era in our 

 lives. Once, and once only, we were involved in the 

 glory of that event. The creature had been in a 

 dream of some river or lake of Kamschatka, or ideally 

 listening 



' Across the waves' tumultuous roar, 

 The wolf's long howl from Oonalaskka's shore,' 



when, guided by our good genius and our brightest 

 star, we suddenly saw him sitting asleep in all his 

 state, within gunshot, in a bay of the moonlit loch ! 

 We blew his black bill into pieces, not a feather on 

 his head but was touched; and, like a little white- 

 sailed pleasure-boat caught in a whirlwind, the wild 

 swan spun round, and then lay motionless on the 

 waters, as if all her masts had gone by the board ; 

 the mighty foreign bird, whose plumage we had never 

 hoped to touch but in a dream, lying like the ghost 

 of something that ought not to have been destroyed." 



WILD GOOSE SHOOTING. 



In spite of the enthusiasm displayed by the writers 

 on wild fowl shooting, in their accounts of " hair breadth 

 'scapes" their " moving accidents by flood" it reads 

 like anything but sport. There is certainly no ac- 

 counting for taste, especially the taste that takes its 

 pleasure in the mud on the Hampshire coast, or 



