Had the Captain only stayed with me a little longer, I should have thanked him for his hint, which set me thinking. I know FLICKERS well. Many a time have I heard that notorious romancer holding forth on his achievements in sport, and love, and society. I have caught him tripping, convicted him of imagination on a score of occasions; dozens of his acquaintances must have found him out over and over again; but the fellow sails on, unconscious of a reverse, with a sort of smiling persistence, down the stream of modified untruthfulness, of which nobody ought to know better than FLICKERS the rapids, and shallows, and rocks on which the mariner's bark is apt to go to wreck. What is there in the pursuit of sport, I ask myself, that brings on this strange tendency to exaggeration? How few escape it. The excellent, the prosaic DUBSON, that broad-shouldered, whiskered, and eminently snub-nosed Nimrod, he too, gives way occasionally. FLICKERS'S, I own, is an extreme case. He has indulged himself in fibs to such an extent, that fibs are now as necessary to him as drams to the drunkard. But DUBSON the respectable, DUBSON the dull, DUBSON the unromantic--why does the gadfly sting him too, and impel him now and then to wonderful antics. For was it not DUBSON who told me, only a week ago, that he had shot three partridges stone dead with one shot, and in measuring the distance, had found it to be 100 yards less two inches? Candidly, I do not believe him; but naturally enough I was not going to be outdone, and I promptly returned on him with my well-known anecdote about the shot which _ricocheted_ from a driven bird in front of me and pierced my host's youngest brother--a plump, short-coated Eton boy, who was for some reason standing with his back to me ten yards in my rear--in a part of his person sacred as a rule _plagoso Orbilio_. The shrieks of the stricken youth, I told DUBSON, still sounded horribly in my ears. It took the country doctor an hour to extract the pellets--an operation which the boy endured, with great fortitude, merely observing that he hoped his rowing would not be spoiled for good, as he should bar awfully having to turn himself into a dry-bob. This story, with all its harrowing details, did I duly hammer into the open-mouthed DUBSON, who merely remarked that "it was a rum go, but you can never tell where a _ricochet_ will go," and was beginning upon me with a brand-new _ricochet_ anecdote of his own, when I hurriedly departed.