WARWICK WOODLANDS. 103 



fields, and lunching on bread and cheese and homo-brewed, 

 in a snug farmhouse. In short, field sports here have a 

 richer range, are much more various, wilder — " 



"Hold there, Frank; hold hard there; I cannot concede 

 the wilder, not the really wilder — seemingly they are 

 wilder; for, as you say, the scenery is wilder — and all the 

 game, with the exception of the English snipe, being 

 wood-haunters, you are led into rougher districts. But 

 oh ! no, no ! — the field sports are not really wilder — in the 

 Atlantic States at least — nor half so wild as those of 

 England !" 



''I should like to hear you prove that, Archer," an- 

 swered Frank, "for I am constantly beset with the su- 

 periority of American field sports to tame English preserve 

 shooting !" 



"Pooh! pooh! that is only by people who know nothing 

 about either; by people who fancy that a preserve means 

 a park full of tame birds, instead of a range, perhaps, of 

 many thousand acres, of the very wildest, barest moorland, 

 stocked with the wariest and shyest of the feathered race, 

 the red grouse. But what I mean to say, is this, that every 

 English game bird — to use an American phrase — is warier 

 and wilder than its compeer in the United States. Who, 

 for instance, ever saw in England, Ireland, or Scotland, 

 eighteen or twenty snipe or wood-cock, lying within a 

 space of twelve yards square, two or three dogs pointing 

 in the midst of them, and the birds rising one by one, the 

 gunshots rattling over them, till ten or twelve are on the 

 ground before there is time to bag one. 



"English partridge will, I grant, do this sometimes, on 

 very warm days in September; but let a man go out with 

 his heavy gun and steady dog late in December, or the 

 month preceding it. let him see thirty or more covies — 

 as on good ground he may — let him see every covey rise 

 at a hundred yards, and fly a mile; let him be proud and 

 glad to bag his three or four brace; and then tell me that 

 there is any sport in these Atlantic States so wild as 

 English winter field-shooting. 



"Of grouse shooting on the bare hills, which, by the 

 way, are wilder, more solitary far, and more aloof from 

 the abodes of men, than any thing between Boston and 

 the Green Bay, I do not of course speak ; as it confessedly 

 is the most wild and diflficult kind of shooting. 



