GENUINE SPORT. 209 



longing to the late Sir Francis Burdett (their sire 

 one of John Warde's fox-hounds) over which I 

 have often shot, and these were equally hard and 

 indomitable, requiring a vast amount of work to 

 be kept steady to their game. Pointers with 'this 

 cross, although most difficult to break at first, are 

 invaluable afterwards for wild shooting, where 

 birds and game are not over -plentiful, although in 

 strictly preserved ground, where partridges are as 

 numerous as poultry in a farm-yard, a slow, tod- 

 dling old Spanish pointer is more in keeping with 

 this battue system ; but a genuine sportsman repu- 

 diates such wholesale butchery. To render sport 

 intelligible to a sportsman, there must be some 

 excitement in the pursuit, an interest in the work- 

 ing of his dogs, and a little uncertainty as to the 

 finding of his game ; and if at the end of the day 

 he returns home with four or five brace of birds 

 and a hare or two, his expectations and wants are 

 satisfied, and he feels in a more healthful state of 

 mind and body than the battue man who has not 

 probably walked much more than a mile to 

 slaughter his twenty or thirty brace. I would not 

 if I could be a dead shot, a distinction which some 

 are so ambitious to obtain, and others so tenacious 

 of retaining, that they pick every shot rather than 

 incur the risk of missing two or three out of a 



p 



