both interesting and useful; the general criticism we are tempted to pass on all such teaching being merely this, that, however excellent in itself, the man who stands most in need of it is nearly sure, as soon as he puts up his gun, to forget all about it. The few who remember it, and are really able to put it in practice, will certainly not accuse Mr Lancaster of knowing nothing about shooting.

Most men know, theoretically, that they must shoot in front of a bird that is crossing them, a little over a bird going straight away from them, and that they must jerk themselves backward a little in shooting at one right overhead. Mr Lancaster's diagrams show us our theory in practice, and help to fix in the memory maxims which are apt to escape us at the critical moment when conveyed only in words. There is, of course, to experienced sportsmen a good deal in the book which will seem superfluous, and to savour somewhat of padding. But we would ask such men to put back the dial some twenty or thirty years, and to imagine themselves once more novices, and then to consider whether they might not have saved themselves much bad shooting, and much disappointment and mortification, had a book like this been placed in their hands when they were sixteen.

But, in justice to Mr Lancaster, it is necessary to explain very clearly that his book is intended less even for beginners than for those seri studiorum who wish to learn to shoot in middle age. The business man who has realised a fortune, and has taken "a place" in the country, however formed by nature for the appreciation of rural pleasures, may have never had the opportunity of handling a gun in his life. In the present day there

is no scarcity of such men, and I believe I may say that it is principally for these that the Art of Shooting' is intended.

e

There is sufficient similarity between grouse and partridge shooting to warrant us in applying to both the majority of Mr Lancaster's diagrams which relate to either. There is one shot, however, not indeed peculiar to grouse, but so much more frequently presented to us in grouse - shooting that it may fairly be called a characteristic of it, and that is the downward or descending shot. Say we are approaching the brow of a hill which descends abruptly on the other side: suddenly the dogs stand motionless on the summit, one visible from stem to stern against the sky, the other concealed all but the tip of his tail by the fall of the ground. approach slowly so as not to come up out of breath, and advancing a step or two in front of the dogs, flush the birds from among some big stones just on the edge of the declivity. Now, if these were partridges they would fly right across the valley to the hill upon the other side; or if that was too far, they would not begin to descend till they were a long way out of shot. They would remain on about a level with the bottom button of your shooting-jacket for the first hundred yards, at all events, flying quite straight. Not so the grouse: as soon as they rise they duck and fly right down the slope, skimming the top of the heather seemingly almost near enough to touch it. Mr Lancaster recognises the difficulty of this shot, though we are not quite sure that we understand the reason he assigns for it.

"More care is really required at making a clean kill at a descending bird than perhaps at any other, because, as a rule, these shots have to

be made on the side of a mountain or hill, where the shooter has only space behind the bird-nothing, in fact, to assist him either in judging distance or pace. And it requires good judgment to determine at a moment that the gun must be so brought to the shoulder as to be slightly under the bird if going straight away down-hill (see Ill. 38), or, if to the right or left, slightly in advance, which tends to make the shot more difficult. At the same time, if good clean kills are obtained, nothing looks prettier, or establishes the reputation of the shooter as being a really first-class shot."-P. 84.

This is true. But we have no "space" to speak of in front of any bird flying straight away from us on or above the level of the eye. In a cultivated country we have objects-trees, hedges, or gates to help us in measuring distance, and on the moors we have none. But we do not see that this is more true of birds flying downwards than of birds flying horizontally, if they are right in front of us. The real difficulty of a downward shot we have always thought to lie in its comparative rarity, and the reluctance with which we bring ourselves to shoot underneath a bird in this position, instead of yielding to the natural impulse to shoot above him.

The downward bird being the most difficult shot, perhaps the next to it is the approaching birda shot, however, which can hardly occur with grouse or partridges except in driving. The easiest shot of this kind, I think, is when the bird comes right overhead; and I have heard many good shots declare that to kill rocketing pheasants is no great proof of skill, it being much harder to kill one going away from you at a height of seven or eight feet from the ground, always supposing there is no danger in shooting at it. They say that perpendicular shots

only require a knack: just the swing backwards as you pull the trigger, and the job is done. It requires a good deal of practice to acquire this knack perfectly, so as to swing without thinking about it; but once mastered, I should reckon these shots among the easiest which a sportsman can attempt. The eighteenth-century men are all for letting such birds go by them before shooting, though there are some lines in 'Pteryplegia' which seem to show that the author understood the perpendicular shot. But to my mind it is a much more certain one than the other, and the bird is much more likely to be killed clean.

But if this is an easy shot, the approaching bird that flies low is proportionably difficult-in fact, so difficult that here I should be inclined rather to shoot after the

bird than straight at him. Say you are standing behind a hedge,

as

Mr Lancaster supposes, not too high to shoot over, and a covey of birds come straight in your face across the next field, flying low because they were thinking of settling somewhere just there: now, what shall we do? It would seem that if you shot point-blank at a bird coming straight to you at a distance of some twenty yards, and three or four feet from the ground, it was impossible to miss him. Try. Bang! You have not touched a feather. Now take that other one that whizzes past like lightning over the tops of the twigs still! He goes away with a leg down, and somehow or other you are a long while putting in the cartridges this time, and find something very particular to look at in the breeching of your gun. Trying to make believe that this was a pure accident, and talking as if you had never done such a thing

worse

in your life before, you go on to your next station. But it is the same story over again. Whether you breast the birds or whether you let them pass, the result is the same. They won't come down. And now what has Mr Lancaster to say to you? In the case of the approaching bird, intending to shoot in front of it, you have really shot behind it; that is to say, that though you aimed point-blank, the direction of the bird's flight had carried him below the shot before it reached

the spot at which you aimed, and in reality he has left it behind him. To prevent this, when shooting at an approaching bird whose flight is near the ground, you must aim low, so as to get the shot well under him, and cause him to fly into it. Mr Lancaster's diagram-No. 25-illustrates this counsel very clearly, far better than any words could do. The only fault we have to find with it is, that the birds appear to be a trifle too high in the air; but they are meant, we suppose, to be descending.

In shooting driven grouse or partridges, some men always let the birds pass them; others never, if they can help it. Mr Lancaster admits that a high-flying bird going away is a very easy mark. But the objection to it is, that the bird has got so much steam on, and that his hinder parts being all that are visible, he is very likely not to drop to the gun; whereas the approaching bird, if he is hit at all, is almost sure to be killed.

The cross shot at partridges or grouse, or indeed at any kind of game, is usually considered the easiest of all. Yet Mr Lancaster scarcely seems to think so, and our eighteenth-century poets certainly do not. Again, Mr Lancaster describes what he calls "the quartering shot" as the most diffi

cult of all shots. If we understand him rightly, he means by this a bird that goes at an acute angle half-way between the regular cross shot and the bird that goes straight in front. But I have always thought this, instead of the hardest, the easiest of all shots. On this point, we confess, we find Mr Lancaster, for the only time, rather unintelligible.

"A quartering shot, as distinct from actual cross shots, is very difficult; because when a bird gets up, it may, more often than not, be flying in an oblique or obtuse angle With these very great care is required to make a certain kill; because, besides the velocity of the flight of the bird, an allowance has also to be made on the lineal direction of the flying bird.

"Care must be taken, with shots of this class, to hold the gun less in front than in actual crossing shots."-P. 73.

I have been much interested in observing that, though Mr Lancaster's book is in all respects thoroughly modern, and full of all the newest ideas, we have hardly a single illustration of partridgeshooting without a pointer or setter in it. This is extremely refreshing But good dogs should drop both to wing and to shot; and I don't like to see them questing about when the birds have just risen, and the sportsman's gun is to his shoulder. The proper position for a setter, under these circumstances, is shown in Plate 34. But in the majority of instances, the dogs are in attitudes that would bring them into very unpleasant relation with a keeper of the right sort. Certainly, however, in Plates 31 and 32, the birds are of such portentous magnitude, and so much more like eagles than partridges, that any ordinary dog, on seeing them rise from the turnips, might well be startled out of his propriety, even into giving tongue. "Thou comest in such a

questionable shape," Ponto might exclaim, "that I will speak to thee." Still I am grateful to Mr Lancaster for introducing dogs at all. To my mind, partridge shooting is not partridge-shooting without them; and I would rather kill a dozen brace of birds over a good setter, picking up the scattered ones in all sorts of holes and corners, than treble the number by walking them up, or having them driven by beaters.

But we must now change the scene. The stubbles--what there were of them-are ploughed up; the turnips are heavy with wet, and the sheep are beginning to be penned upon them. The hedges have not yet lost all their foliage, but they are only waiting for the first frosts, and meantime are the colour of tea-leaves. The elms are bright yellow, and the oaks are assuming that reddish-brown hue which lasts late into the winter. The beauty of decay is now seen in full perfection in the woods. In short, November has arrived, and with November the woodcocks and the snipe, and with many sportsmen, the commencement of pheasant-shooting too. It is a common practice, however, to have a little outside hedgerow-shooting before the covers are beaten, and very pretty sport it is. But we hardly know what justification Mr Lancaster has for the following observations:

"A pheasant found amongst roots or in a hedgerow is almost invariably missed, because its flight is so different from that of other game-the bird often being shot in the tail-feathers instead of in the body (see Il. 37). Bear in mind, therefore, to shoot well over an ascending bird, and pull directly the gun is at the shoulder. A moment's delay is sure to cause a miss; and it will sometimes be received with hearty laughter from one's friends, to the chagrin of the shooter,

who perhaps sees his bird going off with a leg down, if even that; more likely with only a few feathers gently settling to the ground.”—P. 83.

the

A pheasant sprung out of a hedge. row, standing beans, or turnips, no doubt rises straight up into the air for a certain distance, but only a fool would think of shooting at him while he was so ascending. He will very soon begin to fly level, and at just a nice heighttwelve or fifteen feet from ground. If a man can hit anything, he can hit such a pheasant as this. I am not a specially good shot, but only last year in the middle of October we fell in with some pheasants in an outside turnip-field, and I killed fivo, one after the other, without stirring from the same spot, and thought nothing of it when it was done. What Mr Lancaster can mean, then, by saying that pheasants found amongst roots are almost invariably missed, I cannot imagine. In his illustration of this kind of shot, the bird is apparently rising straight up with the intention of flying over some high trees. Of course, this may very often be a difficult shot, for you may be driven to shoot while the bird is mounting into the air. But trees do not, as a rule, grow among root-crops, nor yet necessarily in hedgerows; and where the pheasant has nothing to surmount, he will not go up as he does in a high wood, where it is perhaps thirty or fifty feet from the brushwood to the tops no lateral of the trees, with opening through which he can escape. Then he has no choice. Mr Lancaster would perhaps say that he is only writing for men so ignorant of shooting as not to know that they ought to wait when a bird rises in this manner, and tailor him accordingly, as depicted in the illustration.

But, ah, that finding of a pheasant amongst roots and hedgerows, or in a snug bit of copse, perhaps half an acre in extent, slop ing down to the little brook such as pheasants love, and in summer overhung with dog-roses! is it not one of the sweetest morsels of the sportsman's day? It is noticeable that our ancestors were fond of mixed bags; and in the days of reaped stubbles, and when the whole face of the country was dotted over with beds of thistles, rushes, and rough coarse grass, to say nothing of the beans which would constantly be found standing in October, partridge-shooting and pheasant-shooting could easily be combined, as we see from Mr Markland and Mr Fawkes that they were. What would these gentlemen have said had they been told that pheasants rising out of beans, clover, or turnips, were almost invariably missed? A much larger proportion of pheasants were killed outside of the woods in those days than in these, for the woods wore then a great deal thicker, and fewer rises or open spaces were to be found in them. October was

then really, what it is now only nominally, the pheasant-shooter's month; and to pick up the scat tered birds to be found, as we have described, among the crops, thickets, and hedgerows, near the places where they were hatched, and before they had taken to the woods, was his great delight. He did not invariably miss them, we may be sure. His spaniel, brought out specially for that purpose, would soon let him know whether there was a pheasant close at hand. He would then examine his priming, pull his hat firmly over his brows, and as the bird rose, throw himself well forward on his right leg, and take a long and deliberate aim with his single barrel, when,

if the flint did not miss fire, or the powder only flash in the pan, he would lay his game low, clean killed at forty yards' distance. Our great-grandfathers had this advantage over us, that they seem to have shot more slowly than we do, and this is the one great good of a single-barrelled gun: there is no hurry about getting in the second barrel.

Mr Lancaster gives us some very proper cautions about low-flying pheasants, and his diagram, No. 18, shows the danger of shooting at them. Never to shoot at a bird in cover, unless you can see the sky underneath him-and no wood is so thick as to exclude it altogether-is a very good rule. There will be exceptions to it, of course. Where, for instance, there is a large expanse of low brushwood, and you can see all round for more than a hundred yards, there is no danger. But in high wood always let your shot ascend; and this, of course, is especially necessary when the ground is uneven, and you may have to shoot down hill.

Many men, however, can never restrain themselves when a woodcock gets up, and will fire in daring disregard of human life under this particular provocation, though at other times careful enough. Mr Lancaster has no special advice to give us about woodcock or snipe. His general rules apply to them as well as to other kinds of game. But they have to be applied with a difference. That is to say, that neither the woodcock nor the snipe begin as they mean to go on, and that a bird, when he seems at first to be rising or going straight, may suddenly dip, or else what pigstickers call "jink," to the utter confusion of the inexperienced gunner. The "wabbling woodcock," as he is called in Pteryplegia,' is not, however, a difficult bird to