WILD-FOWLING ADVENTURES
My sporting brother and the armoury - I attend him on his shooting
expeditions - Adventure with Golden Plover - A morning after Wild Duck -
Our punishment - I learn to shoot - My first gun - My first wild duck - My
ducking tactics - My gun's infirmities - Duck-shooting with a
blunderbus - Ammunition runs out - An adventure with Rosy-bill Duck -
Coarse gunpowder and home-made shot - The war danger comes our way - We
prepare to defend the house - The danger over and my brother leaves
home.
I have said I was not allowed to shoot before the age of ten, but the
desire had come long before that; I was no more than seven when I used
to wish to be a big, or at all events a bigger, boy, so that, like my
brother, I too might carry a gun and shoot big wild birds. But he said
"No" very emphatically, and there was an end of it.
He had virtually made himself the owner of all the guns and weapons
generally in the house. These included three fowling-pieces, a rifle,
an ancient Tower musket with a flint-lock - doubtless dropped from the
dead hands of a slain British soldier in one of the fights in Buenos
Ayres in 1807 or 1808; a pair of heavy horse pistols, and a ponderous,
formidable-looking old blunderbuss, wide at the mouth as a tea-cup
saucer.
