* * * * * Beaters' Sport Among others whose days of sport end with the season are those little considered sportsmen, the beaters. While making sport for others, they find opportunities for themselves, and it would be a churlish host or keeper who grudged the poor beaters the rabbits which occasionally they knock over with their sticks. But their love of sport becomes too marked when, in a gang, they creep along stealthily on the look-out for crouching rabbits for their own bagging, instead of plying their sticks with a will on the cover to drive forward game. They show some skill of a rough sort, and considerable woodcraft. A man gives no sign that he has seen a rabbit, his stride is unhalting as he comes up, and it is without any flourish that suddenly a swift, deft blow of the stick is delivered, aimed a little forward of the head. Too late, the rabbit knows its fatal mistake in thinking that the slow eyes of man had passed it over, as it crouched in its seat. The law forbids any man to shoot either partridge or pheasant when the last second has passed away of the last minute of the first hour after sunset on the first day of February. No doubt the law-makers were mindful that the light one hour after sunset at the beginning of February would make it extremely difficult for a sportsman to hit a flying pheasant or partridge. The law-makers wisely drew no distinction between misses and hits--pheasant-shooting means, they held, shooting at a pheasant with evident intent to kill. What is hard to understand about the law is why the season does not end with the last day of January. Remembering that February 1 is often the day when the keeper goes from the old shoot to the new, we think it would be decidedly better for game that the day should be put out of season. It would be the worse for the poacher. As things are, February 1 is often a day of anarchy. And it would be a good plan if dog licences and the game season were made to end on the same day--the one expiration would serve as a reminder of the other. * * * * * Tailless Cocks If a pheasant is seen without a tail in the early part of the shooting season the cause may be put down as fox. Probably the tail has been lost through an ill-judged effort to capture the pheasant made by some inexperienced cub--the old fox well knows how important it is to grip the body of a bird, not merely feathers. But the end of the season also is a likely time for seeing birds, especially cocks, without tails. The cause then is not foxes' failures. Long before Christmas, even the foxes of the year are old in cunning, while the birds whom they robbed of tails in the days of their callow cubhood will have grown fresh feathers long since. The cock pheasant who must face courting days without a tail probably owes his loss of tail and dignity to a gunner who aimed too far behind, firing at close quarters.