184 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



informed by the one I had specially placed that he 

 might ... if only he had not taken it into his head 

 to move up. 



Few hosts are to be relied on to place guns to 

 the best advantage without the aid of ticketed 

 sticks, even for beats which they know quite well. 

 Now and again one meets an amateur who is a 

 perfect genius at gun-placing, and probably he 

 understands the organizing and carrying out of 

 drives and beats at least as well as his keeper, off 

 whose shoulders he takes a load of worry. The 

 type of shooting host who is a thorn in the side of 

 his keeper is the ' sketchy ' man, with a smattering 

 of practical knowledge, which he is unable to apply, 

 even on ground over which he has shot scores of 

 times perhaps all his life. He gives one the 

 impression that he is a stranger to gaps, trees, dells, 

 hollows, openings, fences, rides, and tracks, which 

 for years and years he has seen without observing. 

 Two minutes after the beating of a wood in four or 

 five simple beats has been explained to him he has 

 a very hazy notion of those beats or their sequence. 

 Whether or not he tries to make his own mistakes 

 appear to be bungling on the keeper's part, their 

 effect is the same. He hates that the despairing 

 keeper should offer personally to show him which is 

 the second ride on the right-hand side of the one 

 they are in. He curses the keeper to his guests for 

 keeping them waiting, when it is his own fault, 



