UPLAND SHOOTING. 
153 
bothered, and to lie hard; and even if your setter or pointer do 
run in upon two or three, in a day’s shooting, the odds are, as 
Snipe-shooting is always more or less snap shooting, that you 
will get a long cross shot at these, and perhaps bag them ; and, 
at all events, for every bird you lose thus, you will lose four 
which will whistle away unshot at, dead in the wind’s eye, if 
you beat up-wind. 
I had once an actual trial of this kind accidentally, and on my 
part unconsciously, with a rather famous English dog-breaker 
and market shooter, on the Big Piece, a superb and very exten¬ 
sive tract of Snipe-meadow, just above the Little Falls, on the 
Passaic, the result of which I will mention as tending to exem¬ 
plify the fact I have been insisting on. 
I did not at the time know this fellow, though subsequently I 
have known him to my cost; though I afterwards heard that he 
was acquainted with my person, and had made some small bet, 
or other, on beating my bag; which, but for his want of know¬ 
ledge on this point, he would have done, for I believe he is a 
better shot, and he had decidedly better dogs than I on that day; 
the best of which became mine in consequence. 
It was a very wild morning, indeed, early in April, the wind 
blowing almost a gale from the westward ; and immediately oil 
entering the meadow, I perceived a v man in a black velveteen 
jacket, with three veiy fine dogs, one the red setter I have 
named before, beating up-wind at some three hundred yards 
distant. I set to work after my own way, and so we perse¬ 
vered all day long, he beating up, and I down wind, often within 
a hundred yards’ distance. There were a great many birds on 
the ground, and I had very fair shooting, getting at least three 
shots to his two, and those much fairer shots ; in proof of which 
I may observe, that I killed three or four double shots during 
the day, while he did not fire one. At about four in the after¬ 
noon we parted company, not having interchanged speech, and 
I thought no more about him until I returned to mine inn, when I 
learned that D-had called to inquire how many birds I had 
killed, and expressed his wonder that a person who, as he was 
