66 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
my game-keeping career, not only to organize, but 
to carry out, partridge-drives over ground that made 
things difficult more on account of its conformation 
than its extent, I will give some of my experiences. 
I had about thirteen hundred acres of partridge 
fields, and if only they had lain together, without the 
intervention of permanent obstacles, ] could have 
wished for no better scope for that part of my work, 
which I grew to regard more in the light of a 
hobby. 
The village lay in the middle, the effect of which 
was that you could not get a to-and-fro drive on any 
of the divisions, unless it were early in the season 
and cover happened to be in exactly the right parts. 
And when, as more often than not was the case, 
there was no cover in which to concentrate the 
birds at the business-ends of the divisions—which, 
by reason of boundaries, made the drives wider 
than they were long—either one had to arrange the 
guns much too wide apart, or run considerable risk 
by squeezing the birds enough to get them over the 
frontage which the conventional party of guns could 
cover properly. Here is a point which many hosts 
of shooting-parties do not seem to understand. 
They fail to see how too few guns can spoil a 
partridge-drive, though they know well enough that 
if the guns at a covert shoot are too far apart, 
pheasants will escape between them without even 
rising. They argue—so many birds, so many guns ; 
