you, Master Frank," retorted Harry, nothing daunted, "to be a good
shot and a good sportsman--which, with some few exceptions, I must
confess you are--are the most culpably and wilfully careless about your
appointments I ever met. I don't call a man half a sportsman, who has
not every thing he wants at hand for an emergency, at half a minute's
notice. Now it so happens that you cannot get, in New York at all,
anything like a decent game-bag--a little fancy-worked French or German
jigmaree machine you can get anywhere, I grant, that will do well enough
for a fellow to carry on his shoulders, who goes out robin-gunning, but
nothing for your man to carry, wherein to keep your birds cool, fresh,
and unmutilated. Now, these loops and buttons, at which you laugh, will
make the difference of a week at least in the bird's keeping, if every
hour or so you empty your pockets--wherein I take it for granted you put
your birds as fast as you bag them--smooth down their plumage gently,
stretch their legs out, and hang them by the heads, running the button
down close to the neck of each. In this way this bag, which is, as you
see, half a yard long, by a quarter and a half a quarter deep, made
double, one hag of fustian, with a net front, which makes two pockets--
will carry fifty-one quail or woodcock, no one of them pressing upon, or
interfering with, another, and it would carry sixty-eight if I had put
another row of loops in the inner bag; which I did not, that I might
have the bottom vacant to carry a few spare articles, such as a bag of
Westley Richards' caps, and a couple of dozen of Ely's cartridges."

"Oh! that's all very well," said Frank, "but who the deuce can be at the
bore of it?"

"Why be at the bore of shooting at all, for that matter?" replied Harry
--"I, for one, think that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth
doing well--and I can't bear to kill a hundred or a hundred and fifty
birds, as our party almost always do out here, and then be obliged to
throw them away, just for want of a little care. Why, I was shooting
summer cock one July day two years ago--there had been heavy rain in the
early morning, and the grass and bushes were very wet--Jem Blake was
with me, and we had great sport, and he laughed at me like the deuce for
taking my birds out of my pocket at the end of every hour's sport, and
making Timothy smooth them down carefully, and bag them all after my
fashion. Egad I had the laugh though, when we