A snipe that I did not want to kill in the least would sometimes rise and fly right and left like a flash of lightning, and I would miss it--always; and he would d--n me for a son of a confounded French Micawber, and miss the next himself, and get into a rage and thrash his dog, a pointer that I was very fond of. Once he thrashed her so cruelly that I saw scarlet, and nearly yielded to the impulse of emptying both my barrels in his broad back. If I had done so it would have passed for a mere mishap, after all, and saved many future complications. * * * * * One day he pointed out to me a small bird pecking in a field--an extremely pretty bird--I think it was a skylark--and whispered to me in his most sarcastic manner-- "Look here, you Peter without any salt, do you think, if you were to kneel down and rest your gun comfortably on this gate without making a noise, and take a careful aim, you could manage to shoot that bird _sitting_? I've heard of some Frenchmen who would be equal to _that_!" I said I would try, and, resting my gun as he told me, I carefully aimed a couple of yards above the bird's head, and mentally ejaculating, "'_All to thee blythe sperrit_!" I fired both barrels (for fear of any after-mishap to Ibbetson), and the bird naturally flew away. After this he never took me out shooting with him again; and, indeed, I had discovered to my discomfiture that I, the friend and admirer and would-be emulator of Natty Bumppo the Deerslayer, I, the familiar of the last of the Mohicans and his scalp-lifting father, could not bear the sight of blood--least of all, of blood shed by myself, and for my own amusement. The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so. As I picked it off the ground, and felt its poor little warm narrow chest, and the last beats of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame, and remorse; and settled with myself that I would find some other road to English gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life seems so well worth living. [Illustration: "'AIL TO THEE BLYTHE SPERRIT!"] I must eat them, I suppose, but I would never shoot them any more; my hands, at least, should be clean of blood henceforward. Alas, the irony of fate! The upshot of all this was that he confided to Mrs. Deane the task of licking his cub of a nephew into shape. She took me in hand with right good-will, began by teaching me how to dance, that I might dance with her at the coming hunt ball; and I did so nearly all night, to my infinite joy and triumph, and to the disgust of Colonel Ibbetson, who could dance much better than I--to the disgust, indeed, of many smart men in red coats and black, for she was considered the belle of the evening. [Illustration: THE DANCING LESSON.]