younger brother filled all the wind
instruments with soap-suds. Later on he was always scraping, or blowing, or
thumping, scooting about from one concert to another, making expeditions to
the shrine of WAGNER as he called it, composing songs, and symphonies, and
operas, and Heaven only knows what besides. He came into the old place in
Essex when his brother died, about a year ago, and this was his first
pheasant-shoot. I thought to myself, 'If you're anything like these other
Johnnies, it's no good pulling out the music-stop with you.' On the first
morning he seemed a shade anxious at breakfast, and said he was going to
try a new plan of beating his coverts, which it had given him a lot of
trouble to arrange as he wanted. Off we went after breakfast. We had about
half a mile to walk before we got to the first wood, and I kept puzzling my
brains the whole way about this blessed new dodge of beating.

"'Where are the beaters?' I said to WHICHELLO, when we got there, for devil
a bit of one did I see.

"'You'll find them out directly,' says WHICHELLO, looking sly and
triumphant; 'just you stand here, and wait. You'll get some shooting, I
warrant you;' and, with that, he posted the other guns at the far end of
the covert, told me and another chap we were to walk outside, in line with
the beaters, and walked off. Suddenly he gave a whistle. Then what do you
think happened? I'll give you a hundred guesses, and you won't be on it.
Out of a little planting, about fifty yards off the piece we were to shoot,
came marching a troop of rustics, dressed as rustic beaters usually are,
but each of them carrying, in place of the ordinary beater's stick, a
musical instrument of some sort. They were headed by the keeper, who waved
a kind of _baton_. When they got to our covert, they arranged themselves in
line, and then, on a signal from WHICHELLO, crash, bang! they struck up the
_Tannhaeuser March_, and disappeared into the wood.

"'Line up, Trombone!' shouted the keeper--I heard his stentorian roar above
the din--'Come, hurry along with the Bombardon; Ophicleide, you're too far
in front. Keep it going, Clarinets. Now then, all together! What are you up
to, Cymbals? Let 'em have it!' And thus they came banging and booming and
blowing through the covert. The bassoon tripped into a thorn-bush, the
big-drum rolled over the trunk of a tree and smashed his instrument, the
hautboy threw his at an escaping rabbit, while the flute-man walked
str