shoot that week, I found about a dozen labourers in the front room, with a
high settle before the fire to keep the draught out, sitting in a fine
mixed odour of burning wood, beer, and pipes. Sport was the pervading
topic, for a popular resident had been shooting his wood, and many of the
men had been beating for him, and had their usual half-crown to spend.
They were all talking over the day at the top of their voices; it had been
a very good one. The wood is quite isolated and not more than forty acres.
All round it is the property of one of the Oxford Colleges, which retains
the sporting rights over about fifteen hundred acres. This is exercised by
one of their senior fellows under some arrangement which works perfectly
well so far as I can see. I asked our keeper, who always calls him "The
Doctor," whether he was a medicine doctor or a doctor of divinity. He
inclined to think he was the latter, as he belonged to college shooting.
This way of putting it struck me as odd, but he was right. Any way, he
looked a very pleasant figure in his long shooting coat and old-fashioned
Bedford cords. There is also a college keeper, who is an institution in
the village. The day's sport in "the Captain's wood" had been a success.
Forty hares had been shot, or just one per acre, as well as a number of
rabbits and wild pheasants. The hares were being sent round the village in
very generous fashion, and a dozen lay on a bench in a back room.

Our own day was also a satisfactory one. Rabbits were unusually numerous,
and many squares had to be beaten twice. The gross total of the two days
was only something over three hundred head; but it was all wild game, and
shot in very pretty surroundings. With the beaters were the keeper, who is
also head woodman, and two assistant woodmen. These three men cut the
whole of the hundred acres down in the course of seven years. Putting
their lives at something over three score and ten, they will, as they
began before they were twenty-one, have cut the wood down about eight
times in the course of their existence. The beaters are entirely recruited