, who goes regularly into training for shooting.
Never touches baccy from August to February, and limits his drink
to three pints a day, and no whiskeys and sodas. And what's more, he
won't let any of his guests smoke when he's got a shoot on, He's got
"No Smoking" posted up in big letters in every room in the house.
REGGIE said it was awful. He had to lock his bedroom door, shove the
chest-of-drawers against it, and smoke with his head stuck right up
the chimney. He got a peck of soot, one night, right on the top of his
nut. Now I call that simple rot.

_Second Sp._ Ah, I've heard of that man. Never met him though, I'm
thankful to say. Let me see what's the beggar's name? JACKSON or
BARRETT, or POLLARD, or something like that. He's got a big place
somewhere in Suffolk, or Yorkshire, or somewhere about there.

_Young Sp._ Yes, that's the chap, I fancy.

Now that kind of thing starts you very nicely for the day. It isn't
necessary that either of the sportsmen whose dialogue has been
reported should believe implicitly in the absolute truth of what he is
saying. Observe, neither of them says that he himself met this man.
He merely gets conversation out of him on the strength of what someone
else has told him. That, you see, is the real trick of the thing.
Don't bind yourself to such a story as being part of your own personal
experience. Work it in on another man's back. Of course there are
exceptions even to this rule. But this question I shall be able to
treat at greater length when I come to deal with the important subject
of "Shooting Anecdotes."

[Illustration]

Very often you can work up quite a nice little conversation on
cigarettes. Every man believes, as is well-known, that he possesses
the only decent cigarettes in the country. He either--(1), imports
them himself from Cairo, or (2), he gets his tobacco straight from
a firm of growers somewhere in Syria and makes it into cigarettes
himself; or (3), he thinks Egyptian cigarettes are an abomination,
and only smokes Russians or Americans; or (4), he knows a man,
BACKASTOPOULO by name, somewhere in the Ratcliffe Highway, who
has _the_ very best cigarettes you ever tasted. You wouldn't give
two-pence a hundred for any others after smoking these, he tells you.
And, lastly, there is the man who loathes cigarettes, despises those
who smoke them, and never, smokes anything himself except a special
kind of cigar ornamented with a sort of red and gold garter.

Out of