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chievous as well as boresome. Exeter Hall encourages perfunctory study of this sort, and Exeter Hallites, with the best intentions, occasionally conduct themselves after the manner of a Society for the Propagation of Error.

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CHAPTER II.

SPORT IN LOWER BENGAL.

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THE MIGHTY BOAR "-CALCUTTA TENT CLUB-GUN ACCIDENT-THE
TIGER AND THE SHOE --
-- JACK JOHNSTON HENRY TORRENS
COLONELS' STORIES-THE HOWRAH JHEEL-SNIPE AT KANCHRA-
PARA MIGRATION OF SNIPE CAPRICIOUSNESS OF SNIPE-EN-
COUNTER WITH A PANTHER-BOAR AND BEATER.

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ANY were the songs sung by pig-stickers of Bengal in honour of the creature they hunted, -songs with a refrain that was generally to the effect that "the boar, the boar, the mighty boar" was blessed with all the

virile virtues. Possibly in moments of enthusiasm and wassail this animal may have been overpraised. He has not a pleasant temper, his habits. are open to unfavourable criticism, he may fail in his family relations-but he has plenty of pluck. He will fight anything that comes in his way; not

even a tiger daunts him, and, what is more, the tiger sometimes succumbs to the terrible tushes of the boar. I have seen a boar bearing away from such heroic battle the marks deep and frequent marks of a tiger's claws, and that boar swam the Ganges in flood, -a sufficient feat for an unwounded animal, and one that should set at rest the question whether pigs can swim.

A dangerous brute is the Bengal boar. Throughout the whole of my sporting career only two of my beaters were killed, and one of these was cut to death by a boar; a leopard killed the other: not one was either killed or mauled by tigers.

But my first experiences in this line were, I regret to say, less connected with the mighty boar than with the sow, which, though it cannot rip up a horse's flanks or belly as can the boar, can gallop a little, and, instead of ripping, can bite. This chase of the female swine I saw what time I was out with the Calcutta Tent Club in their beats on either side of the Hooghly, between Calcutta and Diamond Harbour. A memorable club was this in its palmy days, and of some importance when I saw it in its decadence. It is celebrated by a large engraving from a picture by Mr William Taylor, B.C.S. (brother of the better known artist Frederick Taylor), which once was a familiar object on the walls of Indian sportsmen. In that presentment of the Club were shown several lights of the Indian

turf and sporting world-Baron Hochpied de Larpent, Jim Patton, the two Brackens, and others; including that distinguished member (the central figure of the group, unless the prostrate boar be so considered) Billy Pitt, the huntsman of the Club.

I first attended a meet of the C. T. C. as a guest of William Bracken, a sportsman known principally in connection with tiger-shooting. In that prerailway time, when the Mofussil beyond Barrackpore was only to be reached by slow and wearying travel by palanquin, or slower journeying by river in the old-time boat-house of India-the budgerow -the great majority of Calcutta men passed their lives without penetrating into the interior farther than a buggy would carry them; but William Bracken made an annual expedition into the tiger country along the Ganges between Bhagulpore and Maldah, and there spent a month in the pursuit of big game. That was the month of the twelve for him, and for the other eleven he made out his time by an occasional jaunt with the Tent Club and week-end gatherings at his country house at BudgeBudge, near which quail and snipe, and perhaps an alligator, were to be shot; and where also in their season the mango fish, dear to the epicure, was to be eaten in its prime. There was a billiard-table, too, almost as a matter of course, for every Indian house of any account possessed one; and there was occupation for the lazy or meditative ones in watching from the wide verandah of the upper floor the

argosies that passed to and fro along the river— those argosies that then were to be seen carrying their white sheets from stem to stern and from deck to topgallant yards, and gliding majestically over the waters with silent strength-not the latter-day titanic craft of many funnels and dismal smoke and racket, that puff their way along with volcanic strength that is destitute of grace.

It was on the Budge-Budge gram-fields, when we were shooting quail, that I had my first gun accident. As I was loading the right barrel while the left was loaded, the latter contrived to discharge itself; some of the shot knocked off the peak of my wide-brimmed sola topee, and that was the sum total of the damage done on that occasion. But not long after that, while I was shooting snipe in a Howrah jheel, and when the snipe were more plentiful than I had ever seen them, the same mishap occurred; and that time it was the end of my thumb, not my hat, that was carried away. I made a desperate effort to continue shooting when the flow of blood was stayed and the mutilated digit bandaged in a pocket-handkerchief, but with only partial success. Breech-loaders, I need hardly say, were unknown in those days; and even when they had come to be common, I perversely stuck to my muzzle-loaders for two or three years. I lost a good many snipe by this ultra-conservatism; but my old chum Jacky Hills profited thereby, in that when we shot Oudh jheels together, the

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