"In the following week I was due at WHICHELLO'S. He's been a perfect lunatic all his life for music. He got up an orchestra in his nursery, which came to smash because his younger brother filled all the wind instruments with soap-suds. Later on he was always scraping, or blowing, or thumping, scooting about from one concert to another, making expeditions to the shrine of WAGNER as he called it, composing songs, and symphonies, and operas, and Heaven only knows what besides. He came into the old place in Essex when his brother died, about a year ago, and this was his first pheasant-shoot. I thought to myself, 'If you're anything like these other Johnnies, it's no good pulling out the music-stop with you.' On the first morning he seemed a shade anxious at breakfast, and said he was going to try a new plan of beating his coverts, which it had given him a lot of trouble to arrange as he wanted. Off we went after breakfast. We had about half a mile to walk before we got to the first wood, and I kept puzzling my brains the whole way about this blessed new dodge of beating. "'Where are the beaters?' I said to WHICHELLO, when we got there, for devil a bit of one did I see. "'You'll find them out directly,' says WHICHELLO, looking sly and triumphant; 'just you stand here, and wait. You'll get some shooting, I warrant you;' and, with that, he posted the other guns at the far end of the covert, told me and another chap we were to walk outside, in line with the beaters, and walked off. Suddenly he gave a whistle. Then what do you think happened? I'll give you a hundred guesses, and you won't be on it. Out of a little planting, about fifty yards off the piece we were to shoot, came marching a troop of rustics, dressed as rustic beaters usually are, but each of them carrying, in place of the ordinary beater's stick, a musical instrument of some sort. They were headed by the keeper, who waved a kind of _baton_. When they got to our covert, they arranged themselves in line, and then, on a signal from WHICHELLO, crash, bang! they struck up the _Tannhaeuser March_, and disappeared into the wood.