183 
FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
sueli as I trust I may have many, before this year has donned 
the sear of the leaf, which is not as yet green. 
Jesting apart, this is the way to do it, both as regards the 
flushing and shooting the bird, and the management of the dog ; 
and, with respect to the last, I have only to add, that while it is 
impossible to be too resolute, too firm, and almost impossible to 
be too strict, if not severe, it is also impossible to be too patient, 
too deliberate, or too quiet , with a delinquent dog. The least 
outbreak of temper prostrates its own object. All punishment 
aims at prevention. If you distract the dog’s comprehension of 
your meaning, the object of the punishment is lost. Remem¬ 
ber, too, that the brute knows as well, whether he is punished 
justly or unjustly, as you do. 
A quiet rating, and a gentle pull of the ear, is better than an 
intemperate and noisy flogging ; but when you do flog, let it be 
no child’s play, teasing and irritating without punishing,—when 
you do flog, flog in earnest. 
And this is a day’s summer Cock-shooting,—a repetition of 
this that I have described, varied by those thousand little un¬ 
foreseen incidents, which render field sports so charming to 
every sensitive and enthusiastic spirit. First of all, it is pursued 
in the very loveliest summer weather, when the whole atmo¬ 
sphere is alive with all sounds of merriment and glee,—it is fol¬ 
lowed among the wildest and most romantic combinations of 
rural scenery—in the deep, dim, secluded groves, far from the 
ordinary tread of man, by the reedy and willow-girdled mar¬ 
gins of calm inland waters, by the springy shores of musical 
mountain brooks, in long-retiring valleys high up among the 
hills, whence we look forth at unexpected turns over wide tracts 
of woodland scenery—in places where the shyest and most 
timid of warblers wake their wild music all day long, screened 
by impervious umbrage from the hot noon-tide of July, where 
every form of animal life and beauty abounds, unbeheld of or 
dinary mortals. 
And are not all these things a source of pleasure to the true 
woodsman ! Is he not necessarily a lover not of sport only, and 
