marsh penetrating into the bed-rock of the hills, the harmony of red, gray and green, barren and fertile, "the desert and the sown," the metallic glitter and soft tropical sheen, each standing as the happy relief and complement of the other in a perpetual eirenicon of sunshine, whatever their old cosmic difference may have been.

There were other jhils beyond the hills, and the shooting belonged to whoever liked to take it. I had it all to myself for two seasons. The birds used to lie in the tufted grass beside the water and far out in the surrounding paddy fields, but became thinner as one went farther from the jhil. It took a good half day for a single gun to go over one of these snipe grounds, and with ordinary good sport a hundred cartridges would be fired off before noon. When birds were thick if one cared to go over the ground twice it was easy to double one's bag. Or there was the alternative of putting out on the jhil for duck. With much calling and halloaing I used to gather in a few of the picturesque fishermen who plied their canoes all day among the lotus flowers, setting their wicker traps and leaning over their prows intent on spearing rohi, alert as kingfishers. Two of their dug-outs were roped together, and one sat on a connecting thwart with a leg in each. After a few shots other fishermen would come in from distant parts of the jhil and help to beat up the duck or retrieve the wounded. They had a genius for spearing birds as they dived into the weeds and came up for a second to breathe. Shooting alone one had to work hard for six brace; for, thick as the duck were, there were no islands on the jhil, and no cover to speak of. For a moment or two when they were cornered and turned back overhead one needed a second gun. Then one might wait long for another shot. Still every day brought its peculiar chances and

one was held on the jhil by a subtle fascination till sunset, when all the lotus flowers, pink, white and purple, took on the same torchlight glow.

At Christmas time and on the happy occasions when a dozen guns could be collected there were days to remember. The two jhils to the north and south of the town were called poetically the "Rama Sagram," and "Sita Sagram""Sagram" being a high-flown Sanskrit word for "sea." I was admitted into the pleasaunce of the Rama Sagram one March at the end of the wildfowl season, when nearly all self-respecting duck were in Central Asia or Tibet. A few common teal were left, and of course the despised whistler,' and myriads of cotton teal, which give one good shooting when there is nothing else. The day's bag, humble in quality, gave my friend occasion to refer to Hume and Marshall,' and I was introduced to those rare volumes for the first time and read about the thirty-six species of duck and geese which visit India in the cold weather. The illustrations were soon familiar, and also the details of the plumage, feet and web; the color and length of the bill, and above all the distribution of the species. But there were eight and a half months before the wildfowl themselves would come. No schoolboy ever looked forward to an event with such impatience, and no volume could ever have been more essential to a bookworm's peace of mind than volume III. of Hume and Marshall was to mine.

In the hot weather I went to the coast, where some desultory wildfowling helped to keep me in patience. We left Parlakimedi at midnight, and driving four stages in the dark reached the sea. At Parlakimedi the air was stifling. There was not the faintest breeze. With Khuskus and verandah 1 "Dendrocygna Javanica," the smaller whistling teal.

2Nettopus Coromandelianus."

3 Game birds of India, Burma and Ceylon." The book is now out of print.

But

tatties and Palghat mats to sleep on and punkahs going day and night the bungalow was habitable no more. in four hours a fresh breeze was playing on us and a tussore silk suit was not enough to keep one warm. Until the rains fall this coast wind blows continuously and makes the seaside almost as refreshing as the hills, though only a few miles inland the same wind beating over a surface of sun-baked rock and sand becomes as hot as a furnace blast.

The great tracts of marsh and lake that lie just within the sand dunes exposed to these winds and the full orchestra of the surf are called in local speech the "tamparahs." Thither I

used to ride at four in the morning on a pony which saw many things that were hidden to me and caused great alarm to the women of the fishing villages, who threw themselves screaming into the prickly pear hedges deaf to all assurances of good will. It was certainly a ghostly hour and place, and when I arrived at the tamparah with the sun, thousands of herons and multitudinous aquatic birds rose uneasily clouding the air and filling me with surmises of more precious fowl that lay hid. The fishermen befriended me. With the first light they began to throw nets, spear rohi, and haul in the traps set overnight. Their dug-outs would constantly disturb the cotton teal that flew backwards and forwards from end to end of the lake. I could not get near them in a boat, but by wading out into a narrow channel and half concealing myself behind a reed screen placed there to guide the fish into the nets I got good sport. I shot there several mornings and every day the birds became wilder and warier and flashed over the screen at a furious rate as if they were running the gauntlet and seemed rather to enjoy the fun.

Sometimes one or two larger fowl would beat round bewildered and sus

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV. 2287

picious, and a wedge after approaching and wheeling back many times would pass over the reed screen. These were the spotbill, the only duck proper that have two minds about leaving India for the hot weather. I blessed them for this indecision and the vivid color they lent to the bag.

There was little other variety in it. The common whistler, a rank and unsavory bird, fell sometimes as a concession to an early risen sais, and twice the larger whistling teal' added another species. The latter, a rare bird, shy and difficult of approach, was only to be won by strategy. When I found he was not to be approached in a dug. out covered never so warily with green reeds and propelled almost imperceptibly from behind I had to manœuvre to catch him flighting. I had noticed that at sunset they flew north, as I believed, to the Chilka Lake, and as they returned in the early morning they would pass within gunshot over a narrow straggling swamp where there was an island with some bushes and tufts of reeds. Here I found cover and shot two or three as they flew over. Fulva was the only variety I shot by the coast; but for mere shooting there was always the cotton teal, a strong, hardy little bird, fast, and dodgy on the wing, not bad eating and in season any time from October to the rains. Whatever else failed, thanks to him I always used to ride home with a fair bag and the conviction that cotton teal driven overhead in a high wind from all sides and at all angles and elevations give one as good shooting as one could wish.

But this coast shooting was merely an impatient parenthesis. It was not the real thing. The resident birds which haunt Ganjam, with the exception of a casual spotbill. are coarse fowl, and one does not waste shot on them in the cold weather. The miDendrocygna fulva,

grants are the aristocrats. The north is their home, and they descend on India like the old Moslem invaders, and make off again when they have had their fill of the Aryan preserves, seasoned for the real business of life. In discipline, energy and singleness of purpose, they are like the Norsemen and as different from the indigenous fowl as the English bluejacket from the bunniah in the bazaar. They fly in extended squadrons with an immutable purpose straight for the south, and when they return to their old haunts you may hear them winging over the bungalow with a noise like tearing calico. In a few hours, perhaps a day or two-no one knows their haunts or the duration of their flight-they will be skirmishing on the waters of the high Tibetan tableland, or on

Some frozen Caspian reed bed, where the ice still glistens among the brown rushes by the shore. No wonder these birds are welcomed by the wildfowler, heralding as they do the cold weather with their message from the north. These perhaps have flown over Lhasa, and the holy gompas of Tibet; some south-east from Issik Kul; some south-west from Koko Nor. Who knows that the clumsy shoveller wobbling in the village tank was not a week ago breasting the waves of Issik Kul? For my own part I never saw a flight of duck but I fell under the spell and vowed a pilgrimage to the holy and enchanted land whence they came.

I returned to Parlakimedi with the rains at the end of June, and there were still four and a half months before the migratory duck came in. In October and even in the last half of September I haunted the jhils with a keen eye on the horizon and illusive hopes built on the records of early migrants noted in "The Game Birds of India." I knew nothing of the district and could only learn that

duck were plentiful, what duck nobody knew. Out of the sky somewhere, tumbling among the brown reeds or the lotus flowers, would fall the substantial replicas of those plates I knew so well, and I would not need the plates to identify them. It was a late season. In the first week of November I saw a flock of teal. Ten days later one of the first wedge of invaders that passed overhead struck the water like a missile. It was a female tufted pochard. The next day an army of birds arrived, and the season had begun.

It was not difficult to get together a few guns in the cold weather and shoot the jhils systematically. And what weather it was! We started in a nipping air through country white with dew and gossamer. In a little while the pearly mist dissolved and revealed the range of hills through which one was to penetrate somehow to reach the jhil. There was never any doubt about the day, no rain or sleet or shivering outside a covert with fingers too numbed to feel the trigger, but always a flawless arc of sky and a genial sun. At the best of seasons the only uncertainty was in the nature of the sport. Nothing had been prepared, not a head had been reared. All one could count on was a good number of birds. No one knew where they came from or what their next caravanserai might be, and what tactics they might pursue baffled conjecture.

After the first report of a gun the surface of the jhil quivered, and the air crackled with a sound that can only be described as "hurtling." It was like shredding different kinds of cloth, or the reverberation of distant cannon in a pent-up valley. The ear of the old wildfowler is tuned to that music, and he can often distinguish the flight of different species in the dark, but this was an orchestra to puzzle him. Generally the pintail were the first to go. They would rise up high out of range and

after wheeling once or twice to make a strategic reconnaissance leave the field to the enemy. The gadwall, spotbill and widgeon would sweep the jhil and settle several times before making off. The pochards were the laggards, especially the red crest, the heaviest and handsomest of the Indian duck. The females would often make off in a body and leave the drakes behind. No bird is so easily marked at a distance. The coal-black against the white of the body and the beautiful chestnut neck are distinguishable at a hundred and twenty yards, and at fifty one could see the yellow buff on the crest. The redcrested pochard generally made up the bulk of the bag with a sprinkling of spotbill and gadwall and common teal; the garganey, the common pochard, and the tufted pochard were less numerous; there were often a shoveller or two and perhaps a ruddy shell-drake or a comb-duck. The pintail were too elusive, but paid for it in flighting. The mallard and white-eye did not come so far south. But there was always the chance of a casual visitor; that was half the charm of the sport. I expected the pink-head (caryophyllacea) and the scaup. One day I felt sure I would come across their haunts, some lonely swamp by the coast separated from the breakers by a belt of white sand dunes, or some natural basin in the hills a mile or two inland, where the crack of a gun is rarely heard. Then amongst a heap of pochard and spotbill and other common fowl there would be a rosepink neck with a black bar at the throat, or a dull green crest and black body and black and white wings, the last a dowdy bird, but one that would make up for days of vain hopes and disappointment.

At noon every whole or sane bird had flown, the boats gathered for lunch and we counted the spoil. Afterwards some of us put out again to collect the wounded, while others skirted round

the jhil for snipe. Retrieving the pochard was a sport in itself; the "tufters" rose for the fraction of a second only and needed a quick eye and concentrated shot.

Such was a typical day's small game shooting in Ganjam which is far from being the best district for wildfowling in India. I have often wondered why estate owners who find pheasant-rearing too expensive do not let their shooting and spend the cold weather in the east. Not at Parlakimedi if they are going to make a business of it, for there is too little cover there and the jhils are too far apart. For a record bag one should go to Scinde or the jhils by the Ganges in Bengal, or for snipe to Upper Burma. For my own part I could not be happier anywhere with a gun than at Parlakimedi. It was the very desultoriness of the sport that fascinated me. For duck the more guns and the more drilling the better; but snipe shooting is the ideal sport for the solitary man who is happy enough to be in the open air, immune from all obligations save those of sport, which mean the observance of certain decencies and instinctive traditions in one's behavior to the wild creatures. It is a kind of shooting that borrows a great deal of its attraction from locality. Discipline spoils it. The conditions are least congenial, I think, when there is a line of guns drawn up in a vista of dull, interminable, flat, featureless paddy fields where one is tied to one's own furrow all day with nothing to distinguish the ground that has been shot over from the ground where one is to shoot, and apparently no reason why the birds should lie in one field more than another. But in recalling the happiest conditions my mind runs to that amphitheatre in the hills, the purple mountains all round, the marsh encroaching on the lake, and the initiative with oneself whether to potter deviously and explore or to work methodi

cally over old ground. It is difficult to say wherein lies the greater charm, in remembering where birds have lain before and in putting them up, as one generally does, in the same place, or in indulging one's instinct for locality which is so seldom amiss after a season, and which can hazard to a nicety the conditions of bent grass and mud the captious snipe prefers.

There was a kind of weed to be found in the discolored ooze of the reedbeds by the Sita Sagram-particularly where they were seamed with a rusty iron deposit borne upwards by an underground spring-where one used to flush a wisp of snipe every few yards. I think the first time I realized the honest and legitimate advantage of sensation over all theories and gropings of the mind was one morning when I had discovered this rusty ooze and benefited by it. I understood that one must feel life before one can conceive its meaning, and almost simultaneously with the discovery, perhaps a little before it, came a blind felicity of hand and eye by which I was able to convert every snipe that rose from the ground into a heap of inert feathers. I sat on a sunny bank and thought about it. I was a hedonist with a great pity for those who were not. It was early in the day, I had my record bag, and a The Cornhill Magazine.

horse to carry me to another jhil. Needless to say the physical inspiration has never returned.

It was a melancholy day when I put up my gun for the last time at Parlakimedi. It was the third week in March, and the last companies of wildfowl were thinking of going away. Before they came back I would be in a busy, civilized place, where one never saw a live duck unless it were inside a wire netting, or a snipe which was not draped in watercress and stuck on a piece of toast under the alias of "Bécassine." I had been shooting all the morning by the Rama Sagram, where the snipe had gathered for migration. You could put them up everywhere, in the jhil itself among reeds growing in three feet of water, in the green dewfed horse gram, in the dry grass of the bunds where the paddy fields were baked as hard as macadam, even among the ashes of a burnt reed bed. A few duck were left on the jhil, and after the first shot a flock of spotbill rose up, and separated into twos and threes. They were unsettled with the heat, and off their guard, and a wedge came circling within range. One fine old drake with a gorgeous wing bar fell at my feet. It was the last gift of Parlakimedi, save those happy memories which are perennial.

Edmund Candler.

Richard Maxwell was strolling homeward one hot night in September to his rooms in St. James's. He had been dining at the Savoy and as the night was mild and fine he had decided to walk by way of the Embankment rather than jostle in a cab through the crowded Strand. His overcoat hung over his arm for coolness and he crossed to the pavement on the riverside to catch whatever breeze was stirring. As

he made his way in leisurely fashion towards Westminster and was now within a couple of hundred yards of New Scotland Yard, his attention was attracted by a shabby-looking man, a little in front of him, who seemed to be attempting to scramble on to the stone parapet of the river.

"If that fool doesn't take care he'll tumble over," he thought to himself. But the fool apparently had no in