114 SHOOTING THE PHEASANT 



follow, will be larger towns ; larger centres, that is, of 

 misery, of artificial and stunted life, or great areas of 

 semi-detached villas and small grasping trade, in 

 which the suburban spirit will leave to a handful 

 of hardworked parsons and eccentric philanthropists 

 the task of looking after the poverty it has itself 

 engendered, but which is greater and deeper than its 

 own fancied importance and prosperity. 



You will perchance ask, what has the pheasant, in 

 his own person as a bird, to do with all this ? There 

 will, you may say, always be wild heaths or scraps of 

 forest, where the true sportsman, the hardy hunter, may 

 pursue that which is wild ; and is he not a better man 

 than the luxurious shooter of hand-reared pheasants ? 



True ; but how long would it be before these heaths 

 and wastes would be bare ; bare to the naturalist and 

 the sportsman as Claphara Common or Hyde Park ? 

 The pheasant would disappear almost the first, before 

 the partridge or the snipe, even as the hare is exter- 

 minated before the rabbit. So fine a bird, heavy and 

 valuable, easy to see and circumvent, is always the 

 greatest prize to the greedy pothunter or poacher, and 

 would not long survive. And why should the woods 

 and copses, the heaths and brakes be barren of this 

 gorgeous bird life, this natural and picturesque product 

 of their wealth? 



