288 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
For this reason, also, I consider it the duty of the gun 
always to be up with the dogs, and never to allow them to 
hunt wide or independent. 
I have seen men pride themselves on being able to sit 
down on a post of the fence, while their dogs were beating 
a fifty-acre cornfield, in the idea that, if they should point, 
it would be easy to get up to them before the game should 
rise. I have also seen dogs hied in, like foxhounds, to 
beat heavy coppice or covert, while the shooter walks 
quietly along the bank, on the look-out to shoot the wood- 
cock as they top the bushes. This, I submit, is legiti- 
mate, and beautiful spaniel work, but is utterly ruinous 
to pointers and setters. 
A friend of mine, and otherwise a good sportsman, 
once told me with exultation that his setters would beat 
the heaviest and most impenetrable woodcock cripple, 
flushing and driving out every bird to him, as he walked 
along the outside, like spaniels, and yet would hunt stead- 
ily and point stanchly in the open. He was much aston- 
ished at my telling him that I did not hold such dogs 
worth the rope that should hang them. Yet such is my 
deliberate opinion. 
I do not consider that to bag the most game any how, 
is the greatest sport, or the object; but doing it in beauti- 
ful style, with the animals showing their qualities and per- 
formance in the highest possible degree; and to get them 
to do this, one must occasionally sacrifice a broken-winged 
bird and lose a fair shot. 
The great injury which accrues to dogs from getting 
off into the woods alone, and hunting on their own account 
