Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you
have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort
of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with
in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the
birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights.
In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the
gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give
pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over
and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for
the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by
easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness
of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw
him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like
a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic
death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the
peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many
gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows
how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt
from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I
had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink
coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were
mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.