"Vat, begause you would have de bird all to yourzelf, hey?" said the Baron.
"You sall not have a single fezare of him, begar," said the Count. "Ve vill blow you, M. de Taguerague; parole d'honneur, ve vill."
"What's all this, gents," says I, stepping in, "about birds and feathers?"
"Oh," says Tagrag, "we were talking about—about—pigeon-shooting. The Count, here, says he will blow a bird all to pieces at twenty yards, and I said I wouldn't stand it, because it was regular murder."
"Oh, yase, it was bidgeon-shooting," cries the Baron: "and I know no better sport. Have you been bidgeon-shooting, my dear Squire? De fon is gabidal." "No doubt," says I, "for the shooters, but mighty bad sport for the _pigeon_;" and this joke set them all a laughing ready to die. I didn't know then what a good joke it _was_, neither; but I gave Master Baron that day a precious good beating, and walked off with no less than fifteen shillings of his money.
As a sporting man, and a man of fashion, I need not say that I took in the "Flare-up," regularly; ay, and wrote one or two trifles in that celebrated publication (one of my papers, which Tagrag subscribed for me, Philo-pestitiæamicus, on the proper sauce for teal and widgeon; and the other, signed Scru-tatos, on the best means of cultivating the kidney species of that vegetable, made no small noise at the time, and got me in the paper a compliment from the editor). I was a constant reader of the Notices to Correspondents, and my early education having been rayther neglected (for I was taken from my studies and set, as is the custom in our trade, to practise on a sheep's-head at the tender age of nine years, before I was allowed to venture on the human countenance), I say, being thus curtailed and cut off in my classical learning, I must confess I managed to pick up a pretty smattering of genteel information from that treasury of all sorts of knowledge, at least sufficient to make me a match in learning for all the noblemen and gentlemen who came to our house. Well, on looking over the "Flare-up" notices to correspondents, I read, one day last April, among the notices, as follows:—
"'Automodon.' We do not know the precise age of Mr. Baker, of Covent Garden Theatre; nor are we aware if that celebrated son of Thespis is a married man.