216 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



sandwich among his raw levies. Many present- 

 day beaters are young men who have not realized 

 till late in the day the wisdom of learning to do 

 something well men who, as striplings, scorned the 

 few shillings a week they were able to earn on the 

 land during their apprenticeship to agriculture, be- 

 cause of the far more lucrative but temporary em- 

 ployment in towns ; the reason of their high wages 

 being not so much that they were worth them as 

 that the demand for unskilled labour for the time 

 being exceeded the supply. 



Then there are the unemployed of towns ; some 

 are respectable men whose trade is slack, and some 

 are by no means proof against helping themselves 

 from the bag. Possibly the latter belong to a self- 

 help band, or have an irrepressible leaning towards 

 practical pilfering. At any rate, they require 

 looking after in a double sense. Not the least 

 drawback of having to depend on such men is 

 that one is unlikely to be able to obtain the 

 services of the same men even for two or three 

 consecutive days' beating. You may be con- 

 gratulating yourself upon having instilled some 

 notion of the principles of beating into the more 

 promising, only to find the next time you require 

 them that they have got work. Thus it will be 

 gathered that it is often grossly unfair to blame a 

 keeper for bad beating so bad, perhaps, that it is 

 obvious to the ordinary run of shooters. It shows 



