" he would say, for he believed that no such bird
should be killed except on commission, and for choice--barring such
extreme cases as that Dartford Warbler--in some foreign country or
remoter part of the British Isles. It was indeed illustrative of Mr.
Pendyce's character and whole point of view that whenever a rare, winged
stranger appeared on his own estate it was talked of as an event, and
preserved alive with the greatest care, in the hope that it might breed
and be handed down with the property; but if it were personally known to
belong to Mr. Fuller or Lord Quarryman, whose estates abutted on Worsted
Skeynes, and there was grave and imminent danger of its going back, it
was promptly shot and stuffed, that it might not be lost to posterity.
An encounter with another landowner having the same hobby, of whom there
were several in his neighbourhood, would upset him for a week, making him
strangely morose, and he would at once redouble his efforts to add
something rarer than ever to his own collection.

His arrangements for shooting were precisely conceived. Little slips of
paper with the names of the "guns" written thereon were placed in a hat,
and one by one drawn out again, and this he always did himself. Behind
the right wing of the house he held a review of the beaters, who filed
before him out of the yard, each with a long stick in his hand, and no
expression on his face. Five minutes of directions to the keeper, and
then the guns started, carrying their own weapons and a sufficiency of
cartridges for the first drive in the old way.

A misty radiance clung over the grass as the sun dried the heavy dew; the
thrushes hopped and ran and hid themselves, the rooks cawed peacefully in
the old elms. At an angle the game cart, constructed on Mr. Pendyce's
own pattern, and drawn by a hairy horse in charge of an aged man, made
its way slowly to the end of the first beat:

George lagged behind, his hands deep in his pockets, drinking in the joy
of the tranquil day, the soft bird sounds, so clear and friendly, that
chorus of wild life. The scent of the coverts stole to him, and he
thought:

'What a ripping day for shooting!'

The Squire, wearing a suit carefully coloured so that no bird should see
him, leather leggings, and a cloth helmet of his own devising, ventilated
by many little holes, came up to his son; and the spaniel John, who had a
passion for the collection of birds almost equal to his master's, came u