The strong young hunter is often the worst. Likely enough he does the work for the work’s sake, laughs at mountain-sides, and, like a friend of our own, starts at dawn, travels all day, tells us at night of peaks at fabulous distances on which he has stood, but comes back empty-handed, simply because he is too strong, too fast, and runs over ground leaving behind him, or ‘jumping’ out of range, game which a feebler man might have seen when crawling slowly over the hillside or sitting down for a frequent rest. One really good Western sportsman we know advocates a very different system. ‘Camp,’ he says, ‘near where game is, look out for likely places, and then go and sit about near them all day long. If the game comes to you, you’ll probably get it; if it don’t you won’t, and you wouldn’t any way. Somehows,’ he generally adds, ‘them bull elicks allus did have longer legs than mine, d--n ’em.’ Perhaps a knowledge of natural history is almost better than either great physical powers or exceptional skill with the rifle. If you watch a first-rate tennis-player, it will seem to you that tennis is a very easy game. The second-rate player performs prodigies of activity to get into the right place in time, but the first-rate man never seems to be obliged to exert himself at all. He always is where he ought to be. So it is with the good man to hounds. His place at the fence is the easiest, and yet he never seems to swerve or pick his place. In every case it is the same. Knowledge of the game helps all the men in the same way, and each in his own fashion picks his place; but he picks it long beforehand. The tennis-player knows where the return must come, the hunting man sees the weak place by which he means to go out at the very moment that he comes in to a field, and in like manner the big game hunter gets to where the big game is because he has calculated beforehand where it ought to be, and experience and knowledge of the beasts’ habits, and a certain instinct which some men have, do not mislead him. First, then, study the habits of wild animals generally. They are much the same all the world over, and a man may learn a great deal by the side of an English covert, when the rabbits and pheasants are running before the beaters, which he can turn to good use when hunting bigger game.