Those days were gone,
but still his interest in shooting was unabated.
Nothing had been altered on the place since he was a boy: the rent even
was the same. But all that is now changed--swept away before modern
improvements; and the rare old man is gone too, and I think his only
enemy also.
There was nothing I used to look forward to, as the summer waned, with
so much delight as the snipe shooting. Regularly as the swallow to the
eaves in spring, the snipe comes back with the early frosts of autumn to
the same well-known spots--to the bend of the brook or the boggy corner
in the ploughed field--but in most uncertain numbers. Sometimes flocks
of ten or twenty, sometimes only twos and threes are seen, but always
haunting particular places.
They have a special affection for peaty ground, black and spongy, where
every footstep seems to squeeze water out of the soil with a slight
hissing sound, and the boot cuts through the soft turf. There, where a
slow stream winds in and out, unmarked by willow or bush, but fringed
with green aquatic grasses growing on a margin of ooze, the snipe finds
tempting food; or in the meadows where a little spring breaks forth in
the ditch and does not freeze--for water which has just bubbled out of
the earth possesses this peculiarity, and is therefore favourable to low
forms of insect or slug life in winter--the snipe may be found when the
ponds are bound with ice.
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