A Sportsman at Large 159 



to his credit seeing that he had but one eye, having lost the 

 left optic \vhen a lad of nine years. It seems he was watching 

 some workmen as they were chipping iron railings. A splinter 

 of the metal penetrated, as it was thought, the lid only. The 

 poor little lad suffered hardly any pain or inconvenience at 

 the time, but a few weeks later he began to experience dreadful 

 tortures. He was taken to a celebrated Parisian oculist, 

 who found that the iron splinter had, in fact, penetrated the 

 ball of the eye, and lodged at its base, and that, as acute 

 inflammation had supervened, there was nothing for it but 

 the removal of the eye itself, and the insertion of a glass 

 substitute. 



When I first met " Bizzy " as we were wont to call him 

 he was about twenty-four years of age, and had just come 

 into a nice little inheritance, represented by a capital sum 

 in spot cash. So he and his charming wife were intent on 

 getting all they could of enjoyment out of life, on the carpe 

 diem principle one which I myself have followed religiously, 

 and which legend I adopted as my personal motto in place 

 of the ancestral one : " Onward, upward! " After all, when 

 you come to think of it, the second is or should be the 

 corollary to the first. And so it was that he and I, and his 

 and mine, formed a hegemony of friendship which lasted 

 many years, and brought much joy to the partie carre ! 



This was long after my triumph in the International week 

 of 1883. 



I had dropped pigeon shooting for a very long interval, 

 but took it up again when my hunting days were over. I 

 found that my form, such as it was, had not fatally 

 deteriorated, whilst " Bizzy " was making a steady mark 

 as a " classy " shot. 



Just for sport, he and I issued a challenge to pit ourselves 

 in a " foursome " against any two shooters from any country, 

 whether of the same or of mixed nationalities a piece of 

 colossal cheek, which should have brought a well-merited 

 snub on our devoted heads. 



But, strange to say, none seemed to care to take up the 

 gauntlet in a hurry. At last two foreigners did so. These 

 were the Spanish Count O'Brien (sounds more like a " Paddy/' 



