BEATERS AND STOPS 217 
what a keeper has to put up with. For if bad 
beating, caused by bad beaters, is evident to the 
guns from their view-points on the rides, how 
much more so must it be to the keeper behind 
the scenes, where he notices each trivial mistake 
of omission and commission ?—points which, apart 
from radically bad beating, make for a continual 
leakage of success that might have been. If a 
gun is in doubt as to how much a keeper in 
charge of a party of beaters has to depend on 
each individual’s gumption, let him take practical 
command of an ordinary set of beaters during a 
day’s covert-shooting of known possibilities. Half 
the time he will not know where the beaters are, 
or, for that matter, where he is himself. I remember 
a man who, as a rule, shot well; but one always 
could tell that he was a bit off the spot by the 
way in which he would blare out at his keeper 
that he and the beaters were playing the fool. 
I have known men who had beaten all their lives, 
yet were absolutely hopeless so far as gumption was 
concerned ; some of them men with fifty years’ ex- 
perience of beating, whom I would rather pay to 
stay away than have for nothing. I counted it 
good work on the part of one man (whom, of 
course, I employed only when I was very short of 
beaters) if he kept in the right beat. When he 
started near the outside of a beat, and finished 
anywhere near the middle, his companions were 
