INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS XLIII 



Frank Forester had written what as long as men read will 

 be judged the best description of shooting of the wood- 

 cock, quail, ruffed grouse, and snipe in America, and al- 

 ready within us was a contented and satisfied feeling — 

 "For this work is well done." And as I looked on the 

 right and left to the mountains came the thought of the 

 wonderful sport which Frank, Tom and Harry had in the 

 middle of the last century, sport which was, as Forester 

 said — ''a day's sport to talk about for years afterwards." 



"Fifty-one woodcock, forty-nine English snipe, twenty- 

 seven quail and a brace of ruffed grouse — one hundred 

 and twenty-nine head in all — in an unpreserved country 

 and very hard walking" — far different from the preserved 

 sport in England, where, as the following shows, when 

 the monarchs were shooting game, not men, their bag 

 was: (See opposite page). 



While Master of the Westmeath Hunt in Ireland I 

 heard that often six hundred woodcock were shot in Lord 

 Ardilaun's covers in a day on the islands in the lake at 

 Cong in Galway County where the birds are preserved 

 throughout the year and then driven in for miles around 

 for the noblemen's guns. Forester's Warwick Woodlands 

 revealed unpreserved sport in an unpreserved country 

 with an atmosphere of bracing air and sparkling sunshine 

 which no other country can show and of which all true 

 Americans are proud. 



Among our great sporting writers is T. B. Thorpe who 

 has described wild turkey hunting in Louisiana with words 

 that equal Forester. The Honorable William Elliott, who, 

 bred from a "Southern family that formed the nobility of 

 America" wrote with the pen of a gentleman sportsman 

 about "Carolina Sports" almost a century ago. William 

 A. Baillie-Grohman has in Fifteen Years' Sport and Life 

 in the Hunting Orounds of Western America and British 

 Columbia given us the best about big game hunting. 

 Frank Gray Griswold, whose five volumes of Sport ov 

 Land and Water will years hence be eagerly sought for 

 by those desiring to obtain through the reminiscences of 

 a gentleman who, in many cases took the leading part, a 

 true history of the great events in racing, hunting, sailing 

 and polo from the eighties to the present day, and Theo- 

 dore Roosevelt who, in The Wilderness Hunter and The 

 Outdoor Pastim.es of an American Hunter has told lis of 



