the run of my father’s shooting and gave me my first lessons in that pursuit. He was slow but pretty sure with his gun, and whenever he brought down a particularly neat shot cried out “Capital! Wonderful! All right!”
There was another dear old sportsman named Bubb, a neighbour of ours, who always came to shoot Chatcombe Wood, then celebrated for wood¬ cocks (I shot my last woodcock here in December, 1921). He dressed in a very long and heavy velveteen coat with two immense hare-pockets in the skirts, and sheepskin leggings reaching halfway up his thighs such as were worn in those days by all woodmen and country labourers. He never would change his old Joe Manton muzzle-loader, and was very slow in loading, but he was a great favourite with us boys because he filled his pockets with a particular apple, still known in the Vale of Gloucester as “Ashmeads Kernel," which he distributed to the party after we had par¬ taken of the beer, bread and cheese, and onions, which then formed the staple of a shooting lunch.
To return to school, I can only say that it has the credit, which I think no other small private school can boast, of producing two boys at the same time who attained the distinction of F.R.S. in after life—namely, Lord Walsingham and myself. Another boy who I can remember there was the late Sir William ffolkes of Hillington, Norfolk, where I used to stay when I visited my uncle, Robert Elwes of Congham; Sir William ffolkes afterwards married one of his daughters. Hillington Hall, which was his property, was a charming old place built of a peculiar local red stone in small thin pieces called Cars tone. When staying here in after life, I remember that a place called Docking, though separate from the rest of the estate and without any keeper, produced a greater number of part¬ ridges on 600 acres than any other farm I have ever seen or heard of. Sir William adopted a plan, which I think might be followed with advantage elsewhere, of giving the tenant one shilling apiece for partridges, to be divided among the men regularly employed on the farm, and as in the year I speak of no less than 900 were killed, it made every one of them as anxious to preserve the birds as a regular keeper.
Before a boy was considered a past graduate of this school by the others he had to perform certain feats of tree climbing, which consisted in crossing from one tree to another without descending to the ground; and the skill which was thus developed in climbing would no doubt have made us excellent midshipmen, and was very useful to me afterwards in my orni¬ thological expeditions. Catapults were then the only means by which we brought down live birds, and I remember the delight with which I first carried a walking-stick gun, probably the most dangerous form of gun that a boy could be given, for it had no trigger guard and a very uncertain half- cock; so, after nearly blowing a friend’s head off while walking along a path, I gave it up.
On leaving this school in 1858 I went to Eton, and as my future tutor, the late Rev. Mr. Durnford, commonly called “Judy," had no room in his house, I spent the first half at a dame’s called Stevens, which old Etonians will remember at the corner of Fellows' Yard on the left as you go into the playing fields.
It is extraordinary how such small, ill-arranged and ill-adapted houses
