Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. DIFFICULTIES AND RESOURCES. As the sun slowly sets, and evening closes in, two ideas forcibly suggest themselves, namely, that it is becoming too dark to shoot. and that dinner would be very acceptable. A few sandwiches and a flask of sherry can scarcely be considered a meal, at all events by the shore shooter, who has worked hard for ten or twelve hours, but eating is quite a secondary consideration—the excitement of the sport does not allow one to think of it. Nevertheless, you must eat to live, as you would live to shoot, and the day's sport ended, there is nothing for it but to return home. The birds to be preserved, each with a little cotton wool in the mouth to prevent the escape of saliva, which would stain the feathers, and placed head first in a cone of paper (such as the grocers make for sugar) to keep the plumage in order, being stowed carefully away;larger shot substituted in the gun on the chance of getting a duck or heron on the way home; and the solacing pipe well filled and lit; a satisfactory start is finally effected. As the punt glides slowly on over an ebb-tide, there is abundant time and abundant matter for the most agreeable reflections. The shore line fades from view; land and water unite, you know not where; sea and sky seem one vast element; the clouds so many islands in an unknown ocean. You gaze and dream, and dream and gaze, until a peculiar grating sound at the bottom of the punt rudely dispels the "sublime," and obtrudes the "ridiculous " fact that you are hard and fast on a mud bank. Did, you ever get stuck upon a mud bank with the tide running out ? If not, don't, if you can help it. It is anything but amusing, and usually provokes bad language. In this dilemma, if you are a novice at " setting," you will in all probability plac...