Captain. "I nevah travel Second-Class!"
Boy. "This way Third, Sir!"
CONVERSATIONAL HINTS FOR YOUNG SHOOTERS.
The Smoking-Room.
The subject of the Smoking-room would seem to be intimately and necessarily connected with the subject of smoke, which was dealt with in our last Chapter. A very good friend of mine, Captain Shabrack of the 55th (Queen Elizabeth's Own) Hussars, was good enough to favour me with his views the other day. I met the gallant officer, who is, as all the world knows, one of the safest and best shots of the day, in Pall Mall. He had just stepped out of his Club—the luxurious and splendid Tatterdemalion, or, as it is familiarly called, "the Tat"—where, to use his own graphic language, he had been "killing the worm with a nip of Scotch."
"Early Scotch woodcock, I suppose," says I, sportively alluding to the proverb.
"Scotch woodcock be blowed," says the Captain, who, it must be confessed, does not include an appreciation of delicate humour amongst his numerous merits; "Scotch, real Scotch, a noggin of it, my boy, with soda in a long glass; glug, glug, down it goes, hissin' over the hot coppers. You know the trick, my son, it's no use pretendin' you don't"—and thereupon the high-spirited warrior dug me good-humouredly in the ribs, and winked at me with an eye which, if the truth must be told, was bloodshot to the very verge of ferocity.
"Talkin' of woodcock," he continued—we were now walking along Pall Mall together—"they tell me you're writin' some gas or other about shootin'. Well, if you want a tip from me, just you let into the smokin' room shots a bit; you know the sort I mean, fellows who are reg'lar devils at killin' birds when they haven't got a gun in their hands. Why, there's that little son of a corn-crake, Flickers—when once he gets talkin' in a smokin' room nothing can hold him. He'd talk the hind leg off a donkey. I know he jolly nearly laid me out the last time I met him with all his talk—No, you don't," continued the Captain, imagining, perhaps, that I was going to rally him on his implied connection of himself with the three-legged animal he had mentioned, "no you don't—it wouldn't be funny; and besides, I'm not donkey enough to stand much of that ass Flickers. So just you pitch into him, and the rest of 'em, my bonny boy, next time you put pen to paper." At this moment my cheerful friend observed a hansom that took his fancy. "Gad!" he said, "I never can resist one of those india-rubber tires. Ta, ta, old cock—keep your pecker up. Never forget your goloshes when it rains, and always wear flannel next your skin," and, with that, he sprang into his hansom, ordered the cabman to drive him round the town as long as a florin would last, and was gone.
Had the Captain only stayed with me a little longer, I should have thanked him for his hint, which set me thinking. I know Flickers well. Many a time have I heard that notorious romancer holding forth on his achievements in sport, and love, and society. I have caught him tripping, convicted him of imagination on a score of occasions; dozens of his acquaintances must have found him out over and over again; but the fellow sails on, unconscious of a reverse, with a sort of smiling persistence, down the stream of modified untruthfulness, of which nobody ought to know better than Flickers the rapids, and shallows, and rocks on which the mariner's bark is apt to go to wreck. What is there in the pursuit of sport, I ask myself, that brings on this strange tendency to exaggeration? How few escape it. The excellent, the prosaic Dubson, that broad-shouldered, whiskered, and eminently snub-nosed Nimrod, he too, gives way occasionally. Flickers's, I own, is an extreme case. He has indulged himself in fibs to such an extent, that fibs are now as necessary to him as drams to the drunkard. But Dubson the respectable, Dubson the dull, Dubson the unromantic—why does the gadfly sting him too, and impel him now and then to wonderful antics. For was it not Dubson who told me, only a week ago, that he had shot three partridges stone dead with one shot, and in measuring the distance, had found it to be 100 yards less two inches? Candidly, I do not believe him; but naturally enough I was not going to be outdone, and I promptly returned on him with my well-known anecdote about the shot which ricocheted from a driven bird in front of me and pierced my host's youngest brother—a plump, short-coated Eton boy, who was for some reason standing with his back to me ten yards in my rear—in a part of his person sacred as a rule plagoso Orbilio. The shrieks of the stricken youth, I told Dubson, still sounded horribly in my ears. It took the country doctor an hour to extract the pellets—an operation which the boy endured, with great fortitude, merely observing that he hoped his rowing would not be spoiled for good, as he should bar awfully having to turn himself into a dry-bob. This story, with all its harrowing details, did I duly hammer into the open-mouthed Dubson, who merely remarked that "it was a rum go, but you can never tell where a ricochet will go," and was beginning upon me with a brand-new ricochet anecdote of his own, when I hurriedly departed.