io8 SHOOTING THE PHEASANT 



he is too good for you, my lords and gentlemen, and 

 not one of the six barrels belched forth at him from 

 three experienced gunners can touch him in his lordly 

 flight over his ancestral domain. 



Once more see him, as he breaks from a huge 

 hedgerow, along which he has kept man and dog 

 racing for three hundred yards, rise like a firework 

 in the October sun, make off secure across the marsh 

 to the opposite belt, and there run so far and fast in 

 its trackless recesses that you may never trace or find 

 him. 



Observe him again in his death ; see the burnished 

 plumage, ruffled in the grimy hand of a London car- 

 man, brilliant against the damp blackness of a Novem- 

 ber night, ' carriage paid ' from the country station to 

 the stuffy little suburban home. 



Again look where, just before Christmas, the crowd 

 presses and jostles along the great alleys and narrow 

 ways of Leadenhall Market, staring at the heca- 

 tombs of game and fowl of all kinds, stumbling 

 over pheasants in hampers, pheasants in boxes, 

 pheasants and all other game on the ground amongst 

 the sand and straw and feathers, pheasants in long 

 endless rows on hooks, their gilded breasts glittering 

 under the electric light, the long array of tails waving 

 and shivering in the chill east wind. See the bustle 



