“Yes, to see him shoot pheasants,” continued Walter, “if you would let me go. Millar says,” he added, seeing that Lewis appeared doubtful, “Millar says all real gentlemen like shooting, and that I’m quite old enough to learn.”
One great change wrought in Walter since he had been under Lewis’s direction—a change from which his tutor augured the most favourable results—was the almost total disappearance of those fits of morbid despondency and indifference to external objects, at times almost amounting to unconscious imbecility, to which he had formerly been subject; it was therefore a part of Lewis’s system to encourage him to follow up vigorously any pursuit for which he evinced the slightest predilection; indeed, so effectual a means did he consider this of arousing his faculties, that he often sacrificed to it the daily routine of mechanical teaching. Having, therefore, run over in his mind the pros and cons, and decided that if he accompanied his pupil no danger could accrue, he graciously gave his consent, and having encased his feet in a stout pair of boots, and seen that Walter followed his example, both master and pupil hastened to the stable-yard to join the worthy individual with whom the expedition had originated.
Millar, who, as the reader has probably ere this divined, was none other than General Grant’s head gamekeeper, appeared anxious to be off without delay, as he had received orders to kill a certain amount of game which was required for a forthcoming dinner-party. The morning was, as we have already said, lovely, and Lewis enjoyed the brisk walk through some of the most wild and picturesque scenery the country afforded with a degree of zest at which he was himself surprised. The pheasants, however, not being endowed with such superornithological resignation as certain water-fowl, who, when required for culinary purposes were invited, as the nursery rhyme relates, to their own executions by the unalluring couplet,
“Dilly dilly dilly ducks, come and be killed!”
appeared singularly unwilling to face death at that particular epoch, and contrived accordingly by some means or other to render themselves invisible. In vain did Millar try the choicest spinnies, in vain did he scramble through impassable hedges, where gaps there were none, rendering himself a very pin-cushion for thorns; in vain did he creep along what he was pleased to term dry ditches, till from the waist downwards he looked more like a geological specimen than a leather-gaitered and corduroyed Christian; still the obdurate pheasants refused to stand fire, either present or prospective (gun or kitchen), and at the end of three hours’ hard walking through the best preserves the disconsolate gamekeeper had only succeeded in bagging a brace. At length completely disheartened, he came to anchor on a stile, and produced a flask of spirits, with the contents of which (after fruitlessly pressing Lewis and Walter to partake thereof) he proceeded to regale himself. Finding himself the better for this prescription, he shouted to a dishevelled individual yclept the beater, who for the trifling consideration of eighteenpence per diem and a meal of broken victuals, delivered himself over to the agreeable certainty of being wet to the skin, and scratched and torn through it, with the by no means remote contingency of getting accidentally shot into the bargain. The creature who appeared in answer to this summons, and who in spite of the uncomfortable description we have given of his occupation, seemed to enjoy his day’s sport excessively, was too old for a boy and too young for a man. His face was, of course, scratched and bleeding, and his elf locks, drenched with the hoar frost, now melted into a species of half-frozen gelatine, gave him a strange, unearthly appearance. His clothing, if rags which looked like the cast-off garments of an indigent scarecrow deserved the name, was so tattered and torn, that the fact of their hanging upon him at all was calculated to shake one’s faith in the Newtonian theory of gravitation, till one gained a clue to the mystery by recollecting the antagonistic principle “attraction of cohesion;” the only personal attraction, by the way (save a pair of clear grey eyes giving a shrewd expression to his face), that our friend possessed.
“Villiam,” began his superior—and here let it be remarked parenthetically that it was the custom of this excellent gamekeeper invariably to address his satellite for the time being as “Villiam,” utterly disregarding the occasional fact that the sponsors of the youth had seen fit to call him otherwise—“Villiam,” observed Mr. Millar, “you’re vet.” This being an incontrovertible certainty, evident to the meanest capacity, “Villiam” did not feel called upon to reply in words, merely shaking himself like a Newfoundland dog for the benefit of the bystanders, and glancing wistfully at the flask. “Yer vet right thro’ yer, Villiam,” resumed his employer dogmatically; “so shove a drop o’ this here down yer throat, and make spurrits and vater of yerself.”
To this proposition “Villiam” replied by stretching out his hand, grasping the flask eagerly, then tugging at a tangled lock of hair on his forehead as a salutation to the assembled company, and growling out in a hoarse, damp voice, “Here’s wushin’ hall yer ’ealths,” he proceeded to “do his spiriting,” though by no means as “gently” as the delicate Ariel was accustomed to perform that operation. Having thus qualified his cold-water system by the introduction of alcohol, the spirit moved him and he spake.
“Yer ain’t bagged much game, Master, this mornin’, I reckon?”
“Not I,” was the reply; “no man can’t shoot things as ain’t wisibul, yer know, Villiam. I can’t think vot’s got all the game.”
“They do tell I as pheasands as looks wery like ourn goes to Lunnun in t’carrier’s cart twice a veek,” observed “Villiam” in a dreamy, absent kind of manner, as if the remark were totally foreign to the subject under discussion.