viii PREFATORY 



have been, sportsmen, and I would aim at securing 

 both instruction and entertainment for those who would 

 be. This latter community have before them, I trust, 

 a similar enjoyment of all the many pleasures which 

 during forty-five years of a lifetime spent with horse 

 and gun and rod have been vouchsafed to me; and 

 in order that they may perhaps the more fully and 

 readily realize those pleasures, I venture to offer for 

 their help and guidance the experiences which I my- 

 self have gained during so many years passed in the 

 pursuit of sport. 



It is, however, rather for the benefit of those who 

 are thus entering upon their career as sportsmen that 

 I presume to offer my advice and experiences. I 

 would have them be sportsmen 'good and true,' loving 

 sport for sport's sake, able to discriminate between 

 what is true and that which is illegitimate, and to hold 

 in abhorrence anything which partakes of ruthless 

 slaughter, or which in ever so little a degree savours 

 of meanness or want of manliness, and as being 

 utterly at variance with the truthful rendering of the 

 name of sportsman. 



The brotherhood which exists amongst all true 

 sportsmen is one of no mean order, for whereas 

 courage, self-control and endurance are necessary 

 qualifications for membership, whatever is contrary to 

 these virtues would at once serve to ensure expulsion 

 from its ranks. 



As I write, the well-remembered faces of many of 

 those who have added lustre to the roll of British 

 sportsmen, and who have had to relinquish their 

 membership, called hence by the one inexorable foe, 

 rise before me — many of them friends whom I loved 



