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meant to leave the country. If the steadiest are intoxicated and forget themselves shamefully, you may reprove, but in your heart you cannot blame. Juno overruns the scent, if she ever caught it, and dashes headlong into a scattering covey. Scandalised, she drops to a penitent down-charge, and looks wistfully after the birds as if she hoped to make atonement by marking them. Reproof and slight salutary correction bring her and her comrades to a more chastened frame of mind. Highly bred and carefully educated, instinct and education immediately assert themselves. Soon Juno, after some free but cautious ranging, slackens the pace and is drawing again. Suddenly, and as it chances, against the skyline, she stops and stands dead at point. The form of the dying Gaul, or even the Venus de' Medici, never surpassed in beauty that sculptured image of animated life struck into electric suspension. Not a tremor of the tail, not a visible trembling of an eyelid and her kennel companions, backing and crouching, are equally entrancing pictures. For now that partridges are walked up on closely shaven stubbles and in beggarly root-crops, and only retrievers are allowed to cut into the game, it is an additional attraction to grouse-shooting that you can watch the working of the dogs. But while we have been talking, the old cock who has been running ahead is up and away, indifferent to the fate of his family; as for the motherly young matron, though she lingers longer, fright likewise with her gets the better of affection. Neither of them takes anything by their heartless desertion, and the newly made orphans, rising by one or twos, are spared, for the most part, any experience of the sorrows of existence. It is then, when you can slip in fresh cartridges fast as the others are ejected, that the breech-loader comes in specially handy. With the muzzle-loader, what with the measuring the charges of powder and shot, with the ramming home and the adjusting the caps to the nipple, two-thirds of the covey would have escaped to give sport on some future occasion. And then the worries of the old muzzle-loading in wet or cold; when even a heavy loading rod would hardly send down the wads; when the closed breech grew warm and the nipples began to clog; when the best patent caps gave flashes in the pan, and, being unprepared, you missed the most tempting opportunities. All that is a divergence, but by no means a digression; for it is not the least of the charms of present-day grouse-shooting that the gun has apparently been brought near to perfection.

Could we only have gone on as we began, with such wholesale slaughter, the bag would fill fast enough, although the sen

sitive sportsman would soon be put off his shooting in sheer satiety of easy butchery. But there is small chance of that, except perhaps on some of the crack East-country moors, where the birds in a favourable season seem to lie as thick as the fleas in a Spanish feather-bed. In the morning the broods are on the feed and on the move, and towards a sultry noon they somehow manage to secrete themselves, effectually as the needle in the truss of hay. Where they contrive to hide is often a mystery which experience and local knowledge fail to solve. Evidently, as they must be looking out for cover and coolness, the best chance must be in the hollows by the banks of the burn. The somewhat disheartened dogs waken up to fresh life, as they have opportunities for lapping and voluptuously bathing. It is pretty to see them winding and drawing among the fronds of the bracken that mingle with the heather sprays, and in the tufts of sedges and rushes. What with the heat and the damp the scent is uncertain: now a chuckling snipe will rise where a solemn stand made you confidently hopeful of a covey, or a wild duck or brace of teal may flutter up from the pool round the corner. Towards afternooon and in the cool of the evening you are pretty safe to come in for the cream of the sport. The scent is good, for the birds are shifting, and the broods that were broken about in the morning are to be found scattered along the slopes. It is then that condition begins to tell. The man who would make clean shooting should not only be going strong on his legs, but should be as keenly expectant of each chance as when he made his start in the morning. When you feel fagged, and, after some desultory and perhaps indifferent shooting, the weary flesh gets the better of the fervent spirit, the most perfect gun loses its balance, as if lead had been running down towards the muzzle, and the shot takes to skimming the heather, while the grouse fly away unharmed.

But whether you are to congratulate yourself on good practice or console yourself for discomfiture, the bath, the dressing, and the dinner are the common goal to which the thoughts of all have latterly been tending. There are few enjoyments more enviable than those of the well-spent evening after a hard and happy day on the moors. The luxury in the mountain palaces of millionaires is not to be despised: the cuisine of the foreign chef, the costly wines in a well-selected cellar, are not to be sneezed at; for it is seldom you come to a feast with an appetite so keenly appreciative. Above all, in voluptuous hill villas, with their suites of bed-rooms, you have the refining presence of beauty, the prettiest of all table de

corations. Yet, for old associations' sake and sundry other reasons, we rather incline to the primitive shooting lodge, cramped, cabined, and confined as it is, where the peat fire, with a blending of sea-coal or bog-oak, is smouldering in the single sitting-room; where the loose costumes de soir are rather careless than soignés; where you may dispense with any menu of the meal, because the dishes are heralded by savours from the adjoining kitchen; and where the wines of Champagne and Gascony are succeeded in due course by tumblers of the native toddy. You talk of the day, you talk of the morrow, and if you do fall asleep over the pipe or cigar, no one cares to reproach you for a breach of good

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THE sun had set and darkness was coming on apace by the time we sighted the welcome lights of Brown's farm.

It was the second evening after landing in Tunisia, and the previous two days had been spent in journeying hither from Bizerta, through delays incident to mud, swollen rivers, poor mounts, and erratic guides.

'We' consisted of my interpreter-servant and myself. He was a Maltese whom I had taken on at Bizerta on the recommendation that he knew Arabic and had been a fireman on board an English steamer. He only joined me just as I was starting on the march with my two ponies. I presently found that his Arabic was merely the Maltese dialect of it, and his English was limited entirely to such words as he had been accustomed to hear in his capacity as stoker; he had a very fairly complete vocabulary of oaths, and a few such phrases as 'stoke up,' bank the fires,' 'go ahead,' 'stop her,' and so on. It is true he had one extraneous English sentence, 'She walks in the street,' but this he used more as a form of salutation than anything else.

'Stoke up' came to mean, with us, 'Pack up and march'; 'Bank the fires' implied we might halt and encamp; and with this limited language, eked out with signs, we got along very well-all things considered. At any rate, we succeeded in arriving at the right place--wet and tired, it is true, but satisfied in the result.

On reaching the farm I found a note from Brown bidding me welcome, and explaining that in his enforced absence in Tunis two French officers, who were also guests of his, would be glad to help me in the matter of sport. The officers, in fact, received me at the door, and did the honours of the house with the greatest goodwill; but I missed from the scene the familiar form of Hadj Ano, whom I had known there on previous visits. He was an educated, high-caste Arab, who acted as farm bailiff to Brown. He was an Algerian Arab, and therefore a sportsman and a gentleman, and very far superior to the more servile local Tunisian natives.

The following morning, soon after dawn, saw us on our way to the snipe ground which lay at the foot of Jebel Ishkel. This was a mountain whose purple crags rose high above the plain, very much like Gibraltar in appearance.

What curiosities to me my French companions were! And I, no doubt, was equally an object of interest to them. Their get-up for snipe shooting was their uniform képi and jacket, with baggy linen overalls, and capacious game-bags and guns slung on their backs, and they rode their corky, half-bred stallions in regimental saddles.

The open yellow grass plains and the distant rounded mountains, in the crisp, clear atmosphere of the early morning, brought out a strong resemblance between this northernmost part of Africa and its southern extremity. As I jogged along with my two foreign companions, I seemed to be once more with my old Boer friends starting out on shooting horses for the veldt. But instead of the silent whiffing of Boer tobacco there came from my companions an incessant jabber, and a string of questions as to whether, in passing through Paris and Marseilles, I had seen this or that singer or danseuse, and what were the latest stories now being told.

This seemed to be the only interest, not only of this pair, but of half the officers one met in the colony. My present friends were a captain and his subaltern, both of them far older than would be the case in the similar grades in our army, and the captain was pretty well furnished with adipose tissue. Probably both of them had risen from the ranks; at any rate, their intellectual training was not of a very high order, and their ability as horsemen was on a par with it.

Presently we reached a river which had to be crossed before we came on our ground; it was about fifty yards wide, and just fordable by a man on horseback. The captain, who was leading,

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