JOHN' THOMAS, PUNT-GUNNER. 
345 
transferred to a specially made pocket, somewhere in the labyrinth 
of petticoats, and brought home in safety. 
In his youth, Thomas drifted naturally into the wild life on 
Breydon ; his ancestors were wild-fowlers proper, who varied that 
occupation, according to the season, by Smelting, Mulleting, Eel- 
picking, and such like, the gun, however, always taking pre-eminence ; 
and a shoulder-gun invariably had its place in the boat on whatever 
quest. Thomas once described to me how they filled his father’s 
boat with Grey Mullet ; “ that was before the flats grew up so,” 
he was always emphatic in mentioning ; and to this silting up of 
Breydon flats, more than to any other assignable cause, he declared 
the falling olf in the number of Wild-fowl was due.* Thomas’s 
store of anecdote was a large one, and it is to be regretted that 
many of his yarns are not preserved to us. 
But the hard life of constant exposure, with an insufficient care 
over himself, added to a succession of accidents, told at length upon 
Thomas’s iron constitution ; and after some years of intermittent 
suffering from rheumatism and gout, at seventy-two he lay on his 
death-bed the mere wreck of a man. I visited him several times 
during his last illness, when he seemed to bear his cruel pains with 
remarkablo patience. A chat on old times, his favourite theme, 
would bring back some of the old man’s enthusiasm. A day or 
two before he died 1 went to have a last chat with him, but he was 
beyond conversation. Laying on the side of the bed he prayed for 
that dissolution which in due course comes to us all, but which in 
his case seemed woefully long in coming, though wistfully welcomed. 
And so passed away, at seventy -two years of age, the last of the 
professional local wild-fowlers. 
* I have, for some time past, been gathering the opinions of various 
Breydoners on this matter; they have, invariably, laid the fault to the con- 
struction of the “dickey works” throwing the water into the channel at the 
Burgh end, and the annual increase of the “wigeon grass” (Potamogeton), 
collecting the flotsam coming up-stream, and the silt coming down on the ebb. 
