MY BROTHER KEEPERS 209 



pheasant within half a day's walk of his beat must 

 be one of his tame birds. I remember myself being 

 the object of a terrible torrent of words from a 

 keeper, one of whose woods ran along the side of 

 my boundary. My ground near this wood consisted 

 of seven hundred acres of partridge-fields, on which 

 some two hundred wild pheasants were bred annually. 

 Two other shoots had coverts adjoining my end 

 boundaries. As all three parties concerned went in 

 for a few hand-reared pheasants, I refrained from 

 taking advantage of the opportunities October pre- 

 sented, only bagging an occasional good bird in 

 the course of partridge-driving. The number we 

 bagged in this particular season amounted to seven ! 

 I had been incapacitated by illness, and the 

 1 house ' had run right out of game. So on the first 

 day on which I was able to get about, though it 

 was as much as I could manage to get my gun to 

 my shoulder while a flying pheasant remained in 

 sight, I tried my luck in a few dells near the 

 boundary. I had missed several birds with unusual 

 ease, when a hen appeared at the invitation of my 

 old dog, and rising to a good height, gave me 

 extra time to ' align my piece.' She did not respond 

 to my effort by falling to the shot, but more or less 

 towered, to fall finally with a thud on a bare field, 

 in full view of some copse-workers in the adjoining 

 wood. I gathered from subsequent events that they 

 told the keeper, probably on the chance of a pint 



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