turnip-fields are bright green with hope and expectation--and coveys are
couching on lazy beds beneath the potato-shaw. Every high hedge,
ditch-guarded on either side, shelters its own brood--imagination hears
the whirr shaking the dewdrops from the broom on the brae--and first one
bird and then another, and then the remaining number, in itself no
contemptible covey, seems to fancy's ear to spring single, or in clouds,
from the coppice brushwood with here and there an intercepting standard
tree.

Poor Ponto is much to be pitied. Either having a cold in his nose, or
having ante-breakfasted by stealth on a red herring, he can scent
nothing short of a badger, and, every other field, he starts in horror,
shame, and amazement, to hear himself, without having attended to his
points, enclosed in a whirring covey. He is still duly taken between
those inexorable knees; out comes the speck-and-span new dog-whip, heavy
enough for a horse; and the yowl of the patient is heard over the whole
parish. Mothers press their yet unchastised infants to their breasts;
and the schoolmaster, fastening a knowing eye on dunce and neerdoweel,
holds up, in silent warning, the terror of the tawes. Frequent flogging
will cow the spirit of the best man and dog in Britain. Ponto travels
now in fear and trembling but a few yards from his tyrant's feet, till,
rousing himself to the sudden scent of something smelling strongly, he
draws slowly and beautifully, and

"There fix'd, a perfect semicircle stands."

Up runs the Tyro ready-cocked, and, in his eagerness, stumbling among
the stubble, when, hark and lo! the gabble of grey goslings, and the
bill-protruded hiss of goose and gander! Bang goes the right-hand barrel
at Ponto, who now thinks it high time to be off to the tune of "ower the
hills and far awa'," while the young gentleman, half-ashamed and
half-incensed, half-glad and half-sorry, discharges the left-hand
barrel, with a highly improper curse, at the father of the feathered
family before him, who receives the shot like a ball in his breast,
throws a somerset quite surprising for a bird of his usual habits, and,
after biting the dust with his bill, and thumping it with his bottom,
breathes an eternal farewell to this sublunary scene--and leaves himself
to be paid for at the rate of eighteenpence a pound to his justly
irritated owner, on whose farm he had led a long, and not only harmless,
but honourable and useful life.

It is nearly a