184 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
informed by the one I had specially placed that he 
might . . ..if only he had not taken it into his head 
to move up. 
Few hosts are to be relied on to place guns to 
the best advantage without the aid of ticketed 
sticks, even for beats which they know quite well. 
Now and again one meets an amateur who is a 
perfect genius at gun-placing, and probably he 
understands the organizing and carrying out of 
drives and beats at least as well as his keeper, off 
whose shoulders he takes a load of worry. The 
type of. shooting host who is a thorn in the side of 
his keeper is the ‘sketchy’ man, with a smattering 
of practical knowledge, which he is unable to apply, 
even on ground over which he has shot scores of 
times—perhaps all his life. He gives one the 
impression that he is a stranger to gaps, trees, dells, 
hollows, openings, fences, rides, and tracks, which 
for years and years he has seen without observing. 
Two minutes after the beating of a wood in four or 
five simple beats has been explained to him he has 
a very hazy notion of those beats or their sequence. 
Whether or not he tries to make his own mistakes 
appear to be bungling on the keeper’s part, their 
effect is the same. He hates that the despairing 
keeper should offer personally to show him which is 
the second ride on the right-hand side of the one 
they are in. He curses the keeper to his guests for 
keeping them waiting, when it is his own fault, 
