“There fixed, a perfect semi-circle stands.”
Up runs the Tyro, ready-cocked, and in his eagerness, stumbling among the stubble, when mark and lo! the gabble of grey goslings, and the bill-protruded hiss of goose and gander! Bang goes the right-hand barrel at Ponto, who now thinks it high time to be off, to the tune of “ower the hills and far away,” while the young gentleman, half ashamed and half incensed, half glad, and half sorry, discharges the left-hand barrel, with a highly improper curse, at the father of the feathered family before him, who receives the shot like a ball in his breast, throws a somerset, quite surprising for a bird of his usual habits, and after biting the dust with his bill, and thumping it with his bottom, breathes an eternal farewell to this sublunary scene--and leaves himself to be paid for, at the rate of eight-pence a pound to his justly irritated owner, on whose farm he had led a long, and not only harmless, but honourable and useful life.
It is nearly as impossible a thing as we know, to borrow a dog about the time the Sun has reached his meridian, on the First day of the Partridges. Ponto by this time has sneaked, unseen by human eye, into his kennel, and coiled himself up into the arms of tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep. A farmer makes offer of a colley, who from numbering among his paternal ancestors a Spanish pointer, is quite a Don in his way among the chirpers, and has been known in a turnip-field to stand in an attitude very similar to that of setting. Luath has no objection to a frolic over the fields, and plays the part of Ponto to perfection. At last he catches sight of a covey basking, and leaping in upon them, open-mouthed, dispatches them right and left, even like the famous dog Billy, killing rats in the pit at Westminster. The birds are bagged, with a gentle remonstrance, and Luath’s exploit rewarded with a whang of cheese. Elated by the pressure on his shoulder, the young gentleman laughs at the idea of pointing, and fires away, like winking, at every uprise of birds, near or remote; works a miracle by bringing down three at a time, that chanced, unknown to him, to be crossing; and wearied with such slaughter, lends his gun to the attendant farmer, who can mark down to an inch, and walks up to the dropped pout, as if he could kick her up with his foot; and thus the bag in a few hours is half full of feathers, while to close with eclat the sport of the day, the cunning elder takes him to a bramble bush, in a wall nook, at the edge of a wood, and returning the gun into his hands, shows him poor pussie sitting with open eyes fast asleep! The pellets are in her brain, and turning herself over, she crunkles out to her full length, like a piece of untwisting Indian rubber, and is dead. The posterior pouch of the jacket, yet unstained by blood, yawns to receive her--and in she goes plump, paws, ears, body, feet, fud and all--while Luath, all the way home to the Mams, keeps snoking at the red drops oozing through--for well he knows in summer’s heat and winter’s cold, the smell of pussie, whether sitting beneath a tuft of withered grass on the brae, or burrowed beneath a snow wreath. A hare, we certainly must say, in spite of haughtier sportsman’s scorn is, when sitting, a most satisfactory shot.