THE FIRST BARREL.

ENGRAVED BY J. OUTRIM, FROM A PAINTING BY A. COOPER, R.A.

What an essay a man might write on Abraham Cooper's pictures! How you see the sportsman breaking out in them all! Could any one have sketched such a scene as this, without he had known and felt it for himself? Look on that happy union of moor and loch-the setters' heads; the bird hard-hit-and the other hurrying away, too ready to fancy he has escaped. If our R.A. was not as much at home with his gun as with his pencil, he could never have painted the shooter's life like this.

But it is this combination of the two arts that tells so much. The mere dead shot will pass over many a "bit" of moorland scenery, till he finds it again in one of Cooper's pictures; and then he recognizes its truth and beauty in the same breath. "I killed a bird just in such a way as that, only last season-right over the water; and old Nep had to fetch him out of it." And while the old dog was fetching him out of it, friend Abraham was sketching the scene in his mind's eye, or putting it yet more forcibly on the back of a letter. Make-believe," in field-sports, will not do, talk we ever so grandly. Mr. Cooper's success must owe no little of its permanence to the fact of he himself feeling a real pleasure in what he depicts. There is no make-believe here. He has visited each spot, experienced every incident he tells us over again so charmingly on his canvas. No wonder his works sell for ever, or our subscribers never tire of his studies. He has rarely made a happier one than "The First Barrel."

The first blow is half the battle; and had he missed his opening shot, the odds are, his day's work would have been but a bad one. The bird, however, is fairly hit; and his second barrel has all the confidence of a good precedent to go on.

PLOVER SHOOTING.

BY AUCEPS.

Under the above head I must enumerate a large family, in following up my subsequent observations. Among others, I must commence with the stone curlew (Charadrius ædicnemus), so named and characterized by naturalists from the circumstance of this bird's legs being thicker and more clumsily formed than any other proportionate parts of its body. It may be classified as the "gouty plover"-a term admirably applicable to it. I have found packs of this species of the Charadrius order in turnip fields, during the months of June and July. The curlew emits a loud, harsh note, that may be distinguished some distance off, and the same cannot be mistaken for that of any other of the

plover family. Its bill is long and curved, which admits of its probing into the bottoms of furrows, and other presences of soft mud, whence it is capable of abstracting vermicular and phryganeous insects, upon which course of sustenance it chiefly feeds. The curlew flocks like its plover congeners, but not in such large companies. I have had occasion, when I resided in the neighbourhoods of Ashmansworth, Down Hurstbourne, and other hilly districts in the county of Hants, frequently to come across these birds in the pastures of the low-lands, in which localities they seemed to have bred, as they would not forsake such spots, although incessantly disturbed and annoyed. On several occasions I have shot them, when they have risen before my spaniels. They are plump, well-fleshed birds, and full-feathered; but, what with their misshapen legs, and their long curvilinear bills, they present a grotesque appearance, by no means recommendatory of their character to the notice of the epicurean sportsman. On being brought to the table, I have found them coarse and ill-flavoured; but this fact might, perhaps, be attributed to mere idle prejudice, rather than to an impartial determination of the true merits of the bird. On the sea coasts, I have met with these charadrii in large numbers; they spend nearly the whole of the autumn and winter months on the extensive savannah of mud which reaches for many miles on the southern extremities of the Hampshire and Dorsetshire estuaries. Here they pick up a plentiful and never-failing subsistence; for the whole of the surface of the above waste is coated, when the tides are down, with one complete mat of long grass and other sea weeds, upon which myriads of marine worms, sea shellfish, and other minute larvæ are to be met with in an almost endless variety. The curlew, unless pressed by stress of weather, invariably courts these open and unsheltered situations, throughout the night; feeding, the whole of that portion of time, with unceasing avidity. The note of this creature is very harsh and unmusical, imparting a wildness about it, which grates inharmoniously upon the ear. I have, some years back, with a double-barrelled gun, constructed by the late Mr. Jeffery, of Lymington, carrying half a pound of shot in each barrel, effected sad havoc among the large companies of curlews, which were accustomed to congregate on the shores contiguous to that town. I have surprised them whilst busily engaged in feeding on the mud, and have contrived to approach within forty yards of the groups, unheeded and unobserved, when I have let fly the contents of one of the barrels at them when resting on the mud, whilst I have saluted them on the wing with a volley from the other. Upon one occasion I succeeded in bringing down and crippling nine out of ten of these birds at a double discharge.

The people, in the neighbourhood I refer to, look upon the curlew as by no means an inferior fowl, but esteem it in the same light that they would a coot or a moorhen. They stuff these birds with sage and onions, and consider them, when so treated, little, if at all, inferior to a mallard or a widgeon. For my own part, I was in the habit of giving them away, whenever I had occasion to bag them, for I could never reconcile myself to partake of the flesh of a bird which was piscivorously disposed, notwithstanding the counteracting effects of sage and onions, administered to the same in the shape of a stuffing.

The late Serjeant-Major Williams, once of the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers, who was with Abercrombie in Egypt, when the former was residing at a village called Milford, near Christchurch, assured me tha

a cormorant, when stuffed after the manner above described, was as good as a goose; and that, in many instances, a "young cormorant was preferable to an "old gauder verbum sapiente," par nobile fratrùm, I say. The wild-fowl shooters repeatedly pick up a handful of curlews, miscellaneously with widgeon and pochards, when the former are feeding in company with the latter on the mud; these adventurers sell them for sixpence a-piece-the same price at which they dispose of the coot. And here, by the way (although it may be considered somewhat out of place, yet it may be found useful in practice), the manner in which the fowlers succeed in divesting the coot of the stubborn down in which it is involved, is to introduce the bird, after it has been divested of its feathers, into a pan of scalding water; then to take a handful of powdered resin, and rub off the down, which will readily yield to the friction of the hand, and this practice will expose the bird as clean and as delicately complexioned as a duck. The curlew is sometimes exhibited in the London poultry shops, but it is by no means held in esteem by our metropolitan gastronomers, nor is it at all recommended by the poulterers themselves; so that it may be regarded simply in the light of a rara avis, proposed to the observation of the inquiring Cockney, who, in nineteen instances out of twenty, had never witnessed such a singular-looking ornithose curiosity before, in his life. So much for the Charadrius cdicnemus-its habits and its uses.

I shall next notice the "golden plover" (Charadrius auratus). Distinct, and differing from the foregoing in many respects, still they are both of one family. The latter is a delicately-constructed bird, elegantly varied in its plumage, and highly approved as an edible dainty, when introduced upon Apician tables. During the winter months, when snow lies upon the ground, these birds repair, from necessity, to the sea side, and pick up a scanty subsistence from such insects as are furnished by the estuaries; in the contiguity of which, the earth, in consequence of the agency of the saline vapours, is not so stringently contractive as it is in the inland localities. But in open weather, the golden plover is to be more frequently met with on downs and uplands, particularly among sheep walks, which appear to be its favourite haunts. When tarrying, one winter, at Shipton Bellinger, in Hampshire, which is a small village abutting on Salisbury Plain, I had various opportunities of noticing the habits of this interesting bird. I always observed that, in snowy weather, the Charadrius auratus absented itself from the neighbourhood above-named; but as soon as the cumbrous element had thawed and disappeared, the flocks returned in large numbers to their accustomed feeding-haunts, where they stayed until they were again interrupted by the unwelcome presence of that fleecy covering of the arth.

I have also noticed, among these flights, small companies of "dotterel" (Charadrius marinellus), which appeared to join their congeners in the light of "co-messmates at the seasons of their migration.

There was a very noted spot for the occupation of plover, known as Bulford Lea, not far from Everlay, and near Ludgershall, in Wiltshire. This extensive range of wild ground was surrounded by vast sloping downs, which protected the bottom of the vale from the cutting easterly and north-easterly winds, to which such a bleak position would otherwise expose it. This waste was intersected with extensive belts of tall furze,