216 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
sandwich among his raw levies. Many present- 
day beaters are young men who have not realized 
till late in the day the wisdom of learning to do 
something well—men who, as striplings, scorned the 
few shillings a week they were able to earn on the 
land during their apprenticeship to agriculture, be- 
cause of the far more lucrative but temporary em- 
ployment in towns ; the reason of their high wages 
being not so much that they were worth them as 
that the demand for unskilled labour for the time 
being exceeded the supply. 
Then there are the unemployed of towns; some 
are respectable men whose trade is slack, and some 
are by no means proof against helping themselves 
from the bag. Possibly the latter belong to a self- 
help band, or have an irrepressible leaning towards 
practical pilfering. At any rate, they require 
looking after in a double sense. Not the least 
drawback of having to depend on such men is 
that one is unlikely to be able to obtain the 
services of the same men even for two or three 
consecutive days’ beating. You may be con- 
gratulating yourself upon having instilled some 
notion of the principles of beating into the more 
promising, only to find the next time you require 
them that they have got work. Thus it will be 
gathered that it is often grossly unfair to blame a 
keeper for bad beating—so bad, perhaps, that it is 
obvious to the ordinary run of shooters. It shows 
