92 SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 
will give B. a very pretty lesson in the art of shooting, 
and B. will find to his astonishment that A. end his 
servant are fully aware of and well able to retrieve all 
wounded or towered birds that have dropped some 
distance behind the line, birds which B. thought his 
town-bred rival would never have noticed. But they 
are both good fellows: the provincial can learn much 
from the metropolitan sportsman, and vice versa. If 
B. is asked often enough by the Marquis of Carabas 
to shoot the big wood, and by his neighbour, Lord 
Turniptop, to drive partridges, he will imperceptibly 
assimilate much of the nature of A., and as his ideas 
widen and his circumstances improve, he will be 
found eventually with a pair of really good London 
guns, and may one day be able to kill three birds out 
of a covey as they come over him. And it does not 
surprise me when I come across a man of the A. 
type, who in a wild country, where game is scarce, 
proves himself as keen and as able to secure ten brace 
of birds under difficult circumstances as any man of 
the other type. The grammar of the business he 
probably learned in early life, and has the unerring 
memory and faculty of observation spoken of just 
now. Accurate shooting, a natural gift, he has per- 
fected by long practice and in divers places, and all 
these things make him very difficult to compete 
