presumed that, in many instances, or on great
estates, they are not fed on the farmer's
produce, or, if so fed, that the tenant gains
in rent what he loses in game—though this
would be rather strong presumption in a case
last season, where, on the property of a noted
game-preserving peer in Suffolk, towards the close
of an autumn afternoon three hundred
pheasants were counted round a tenant's
barleystack. But then, when the battue is over;
when, to paraphrase Dryden,

They are all shot down and vanished hence,
Three days of slaughter at a vast expense,

where do they go? To market generally, to
compete with' the expensively dairy-fed pork
and poultry of the farmer class, who feed their
landlord's more sacred animals for nothing.
After one of these double-barrelled festivals
in Essex last year, pheasants and hares were
sold at a shilling a head, and rabbits were
cheaper than meat or poultry. We know a
parish within an easy rail-ride of London, where
farmers with lands overrun with game, are
obliged, when they want a brace of pheasants or
a hare, to send to Leadenhall-market and buy
them. And their landlord, who does not shoot
himself, hires his shooting out to a stranger.

We have referred to the popularity of the
Master of the Fox-hounds; we mean, of course,
the master who takes pains to make himself
liked by all classes; who does not forget the
farmers in the game season, or the farmers'
wives in personal politeness or payment for
poultry. But who is hated like a battue
game preserver, especially a pheasant-preserving
parson? Ask the farmers in Nottinghamshire,
say in Sherwood Forest; ask them in Norfolk
or in Suffolk; or, if a great landlord doubts, let
him try the toast ingeniously proposed by the
Secretary of the Farmers' Club, and give at a
lively agricultural dinner after the tally-hos have
died away, " The truly British sport of Battue
Shooting," and let him, in a neat speech, thank
the farmers for having enabled him to kill
hundreds upon hundreds of hares and pheasants
in a day, " and trust they will still continue to
enable him to show sport to his fashionable
guests."

The honest truth is, that the battue system is
as dishonest as it is ridiculous; and the sooner
public opinion, which is much more powerful
than acts of parliament, washes it clean away,
the better for the landlords in a rent-paying,
in a popular, a social, and a political sense.
Good sport, on the other hand, is consistent
with well-paid rents, and the widest and warmest
popularity among tenants. What says Squire
Shirley, owner of a fine estate, formerly M.P.
for a county, a Conservative in politics, and as
good a sportsman as ever followed a brace of
pointers, or put a horse at a fence, in his
evidence before a committee of the House of
Commons?

"I am very fond of shooting, but my amusement
is shooting with my own dogs and walking.
I never sold any game in my life. I have shot
two or three times at battues, and don't like it.
In Norfolk, at my brother-in-law's, in a battue,
I remember we were ten guns, and there were
three or four guns fired at each bird; each man
had his servant behind him, who scored the
birds to you or to me, so that at the end of the
day there was a list of a vast number more
heads of game killed, than were in the bag. . . .
Before I came into Sussex, I was a game
preserver in Warwickshire upon the estate of Lord
Digby. I could not afford to spend much upon
game preserving, but I had as good shooting as
I could wish. And it was preserved entirely
by the tenants themselves. I had only one
person I could call a gamekeeper. I was
dependent entirely on the farmers for my sport;
and they were so hospitable, that my difficulty
was, not to get tipsy with their strong ale, and
indigestion with the pork pies they brought out
to me in the field. They had a right to kill
rabbits, and hares by coursing, and I would
never shoot a hare so as to interfere with their
coursing. They marked for me, and the
shepherds and labourers kept all intruders off. In
my whole life I never knew such civility and
kindness."

CAPTAIN WINTERFIELD'S
ADVENTURES.

FOUND with thankfulness in the book-closet
of a country-house during a rainy day this
summer, an old pamphlet, entitled The
Voyages, Distresses, and Adventures of Captain
Winterfield, written by Himself. The book
bears date 1802, price sixpence, and is one
of a series called the English Nights
Entertainments, which was printed for Ann Lemoine,
Whiterose-court, Coleman-street. The whole
series boasts to consist of " a Selection of
Histories, Adventures, Lives, &c., by the most
celebrated Authors." In reality, it consists of most
tremendous " Gothic romances," and
most unauthentic ghost stories, with here and
there a veracious chronicle of English courage
and endurance by sea and land. An account of
the adventures of Captain Winterfield are among
them.

Grief for the untimely loss of his young wife
urged Captain Winterfield into active military
service. He sailed for America on the outbreak
of the War of  Independence, leaving his infant
daughter in the care of his widowed mother.
This step was the beginning of his strange adventures.
He contracted a close intimacy with his
superior officer, Colonel Bellinger, who was,
like himself, a native of North Britain, and for
four years they constantly fought together, and
neither of them received the least hurt. At
length the captain was slightly wounded in the
leg, and during the illness consequent on the
wound, was constantly attended by his comrade,
who pledged himself, on the honour of a soldier,
to provide for the mother and daughter of his
friend in case of a more fatal casualty. The
colonel, however, almost immediately