OLD SCOTCH SPORTSMAN.
410. A fondness for the beauties of nature, a sense of freedom while one is inhaling the pure mountain breezes, and it may be a consciousness of power, have made men bordering on four-score continue to love their guns with a feeling somewhat akin to the fervour of their first love, as is well exemplified in an aged tenant of Mr. W——n of Edinburgh, to whom I have been occasionally indebted for a capital day’s sport.
411. Mr. W——n visiting one of his farms, found the old man, who had been a keen sportsman all his life, labouring under chronic rheumatism (caught by injudicious exposure in the discharge of his agricultural duties), so severe as to be obliged to go about on crutches. After the usual salutations, at meeting, the farmer began:—
“May be ye’ll think the place negleckit-like, but I’m no able to look after the wark noo.”
“Keep a good heart,” said Mr. W——n; “things are looking well enough. I suppose you are pining after the shooting—you can get no sport now.”
“Ye may weel think that,” replied the farmer, adding in a sort of chuckle and confidential undertone, “the auld gun and me is no parted yet.”
“But,” rejoined Mr. W——n, “you surely don’t mean that you can still kill birds? You can hardly manage that.”
“I can manage it fine,” observed the other, with some pique; “the cart takes me to the neeps.[79] The bit callant[80] helps me oot. I hirple[81] on. When the dog maks a point, doon gang the crutches—the laddie takes haud o’ me, and though my legs is neither straught nor steady, my e’e is as true as yer ain.”
412. Breaking in dogs is not only an invigorating bodily exercise, but a healthy moral training; for to obtain great success, you must have much patience and self-command; and whatever may be your rank or position in life, Beckford—not he of Fonthill, but the man whose memory is held in veneration by all Nimrods for his admirable “Thoughts on Hunting”—will not allow you to plead, as an excuse, for what just possibly may be want of energy or sad laziness, that breaking in dogs for your own gun is an ungentlemanly or unbecoming recreation. I grant he is speaking of instructors of hounds, but his words in their spirit are fully as applicable to the instructors of pupils accustomed to the smell of gunpowder.
BECKFORD CITED.