Chapter IX

Sometimes towards the end of a fatiguing day, when you feel like an overloaded gun-brig, labouring against a heavy sea of turnips, you may perchance espy a large covey of partridges in the act of settling near a hedge a long way before you. Supposing in such case that your brother sportsman should be a much younger man than yourself, and yet should not have also seen these birds, it is not always quite prudent that you should announce the fact to him immediately. If you wish to have a shot at them, you would, perhaps, do well to say nothing about them till your weary limbs have borne you unhurried a little nearer to the hedge in question. The good old rule of _seniores priores_ is sometimes reversed in a large turnip-field.