CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



all the pleasures of the pluff. But he soon longs to 

 let off a gun — "and follow to the field some warlike 

 lord"" — in hopes of being allowed to discharge one 

 of the double-barrels, after Ponto has made his last 

 point, and the half-hidden chimneys of home are 

 again seen smoking among the trees. This is his first 

 practice in fire-arms, and from that hour he is — a 

 Shooter. 



Then there is in most rural parishes — and of rural 

 parishes alone do we condescend to speak — a pistol, 

 a horse one, with a bit of silver on the butt — per- 

 haps one that originally served in the Scots Greys. 

 It is bought, or boiTowed, by the young shooter, who 

 begins firing first at barn-doors, then at trees, and 

 then at living things — a strange cur, who, from his 

 lolling tongue, may be supposed to have the hydro- 

 phobia — a cat that has purred herself asleep on the 

 sunny churchyard wall, or is watching mice at their 

 hole-mouths among the graves — a water-rat in the 

 mill-lead — or weasel that, running to his retreat in 

 the wall, always turns round to look at you — a goose 

 wandered from his common in disappointed love — or 

 brown duck, easily mistaken by the unscrupulous for 

 a wild one, in pond remote from human dwelling, or 

 on meadow by the river side, away from the clack of 

 the muter-mill. The corby-crow, too, shouted out of 

 his nest on some tree lower than usual, is a good fly- 

 [12] 



