2i 4 THE LAND'S END 



only cruel and brutish one practised. Bush-beating 

 is also common in many of the villages and hamlets 

 along the coast and in the country generally. Even 

 here at this extreme end of Cornwall, a treeless dis- 

 trict, there are bits of hedge and sheltered spots with 

 a dense bush growth to which birds resort in crowds 

 to roost, and these are the places where bush-beating, 

 or " bush-picking " as it is often called, is practised. 

 It is a favourite pastime, men and boys going out in 

 gangs with dark lanterns and sticks to massacre the 

 birds. It is a primitive sort of battue with brooms 

 and caps and jackets for weapons, and very many of 

 the victims are lost in the dense thicket or in the sur- 

 rounding blackness little bruised and broken-winged 

 birds left to perish slowly of cold and hunger and of 

 their hurts. 



Even more hateful than these battues and wholesale 

 slaughter of the starving immigrants in times of severe 

 weather is the little daily dribbling warfare which the 

 boys are permitted to wage at all seasons in many vil- 

 lages and hamlets against the birds. They are actually 

 encouraged to do it ; and it is a common thing to find 

 fathers and mothers after a visit to their market town, 

 giving little hooks and wire and steel gins to their 

 small boys. Dolls for the girls and steel gins for the 

 boys ! Where there is a little strip of sand on the 

 beach the gin is set, covered with a little sand, and a 

 few crumbs strewn on it. One result of this practice 

 is that many little birds after having been caught get 

 away with the loss of a leg or foot. Every day at 

 St. Ives I used to see one or more of these poor 



