On Sundays he played golf--a game in which, armed with a fact, he hit a little fact long distances until he lodged it in a hole, when he would pick it out again and place it on a little fact and hit it off once more. And this was good for him. Returning in the train with other players of the game, he would sit silently reviewing the details of the business, and a particularly good and pleasant look would come upon his face, with its blue eyes, red cheeks, and fair moustache just going grey. And suddenly he would begin speaking to his neighbour, and tell him how at certain moments he had hit the little fact with an unwonted force, or an unusual gentleness. Two days before the 12th of August he would take his guns and wife to Scotland, where he rented annually a piece of ground inhabited by grouse. On arriving he would have a bath, then go out with his keeper and a ferret to “get his eye in”; and his first remark was always this: “Well, McNab, and how are you? Afraid I’m a bit above myself!” And his old keeper would answer thus: “Aye, I’m no saying but ye’ll be as well for a day on the hill.” Each evening on returning from the moors he would cause the dead facts to be turned out of the pony’s paniers and laid in rows before him, and, touching them with the end of a stick so as to make sure, he would count them up; and the more there were of them the better he was pleased. Then, when they were removed and hung, he would enter their numbers in a book. And as these numbers grew, he compared them day by day and week by week with the numbers of each former year; thus, according to whether they were more or less, he could tell at any moment how much he was enjoying life. On his return to London he would say: “First-class year--five hundred brace.” Or, shake his head and murmur: “Two hundred and thirty brace--a wretched year!” Any particularly fine creature that he shot he would have stuffed, so that the fact might be remarked for ever. Once, or perhaps twice, each year, _malaise_ would come on him, a feeling that his life was not quite all he wished, a desire for something that he could not shape in words, a conviction that there were facts which he was missing. At these times he was almost irritable, and would say: “Mistake for a man to marry, depend on it--narrows his life.” And suddenly one day he would know what he wanted, and, under pretext perhaps of two days’ sport, would go to Paris. The fact accomplished, of irregularity, that he would not have committed in England for the world--was of advantage to his soul, and he would return, more regular than ever.