126 SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 
on, you will get a warning glimpse of approaching 
wings. 
Twenty yards to your left an oak, gnarled and 
weather-beaten, but disdaining to turn a leaf until the 
later frosts, mingles his foliage with the russet and 
green of the tangled fence. About the same distance 
on your right-is a gap, with a sort of rude stile or bar 
across it, close to where the cross fence on the other 
side—there is none on yours—divides the turnips 
from the stubble. Between the oak and the cross 
fence they will surely come, and especially must the 
gap be watched, for it will draw them from both fields, 
and is just at the right killing distance. Behind and 
on your right a glimpse of greyish green hill, sur 
mounted by a plantation, on which crawls swiftly a 
little file of living objects. Slender as mosquitoes, 
flashing back here and there a note of white or blue 
to the October sun, seeming hardly connected, so 
impalpable are they in detail, with the long strip of 
grey green along which they move with easy but 
deliberate precision. The Limekilns! and a string 
of the best blood in England returning from their 
morning gallop, with, likely enough, next Wednesday’s 
Cesarewitch winner among them. Farther on, directly 
‘behind you, surrounded at odd intervals by long, low, 
isolated specks of white or red, nestling in plantations 
