Volume Three—Chapter Fifteen.

Volume Three—Chapter Fifteen.New Formosa—The Black Sail.Now, at the Other Side, i.e. at home, things had gone smoothly for them till the day before, in a measure owing to the harvest, and for the rest to the slow ways of old-fashioned country people. When they had gone away to Jack’s before in disgrace, Bevis’s mother could not rest, the ticking of the clock in the silent house, the distant beat of the blacksmith’s hammer, every little circumstance of the day jarred upon her. But on this occasion they had, she believed, gone for their own pleasure, and though she missed them, they were not apart and separated by a gulf of anger.Busy with the harvest, there was no visiting, no one came down from Jack’s, and so the two slipped for the moment out of the life of the hamlet. Presently Bevis’s short but affectionate letter arrived, and prevented any suspicion arising, for no one noticed the postmark. Mamma wrote by return, and when her letter addressed to Bevis was delivered at Jack’s you would have supposed the secret would have come out. So it would in town life—a letter would have been written saying that Bevis was not there, and asking where to forward it.But not so at the old house in the hills. Jack’s mother put it on the shelf, remarking that no doubt Bevis was coming, and would be there to-morrow or next day. As for Jack he was too busy to think about it, and if he had not been he would have taken little notice, knowing from former experience that Bevis might turn up at any moment. The letter remained on the shelf.On the Saturday the carrier left a parcel for Bevis—at any other time a messenger would have been sent, and then their absence would have been discovered—but no one could be spared from the field. The parcel contained clean collars, cuffs, and similar things which they never thought of taking with them, but which mamma did not forget. Like the letter the parcel was put aside for Bevis when he did come; the parcel indeed was accepted as proof positive that he was coming. Jack’s mother never touched a pen if she could by any means avoid it, old country people put off letter-writing till absolutely compelled.On the Sunday afternoon while Bevis and Mark were lying under the fir-trees in New Formosa, dear mamma, always thinking of her boy and his friend, was up in her bedroom turning over the yellowish fly-leaves at the end of an old Book of Common Prayer, too large to go to and fro to church, and which was always in the room. Upon these fly-leaves she had written down from time to time the curious little things that Bevis had said. In the very early morning (before he could talk) he used to sit up in the bed while she still slept, and try to pick her eyelids open with finger and thumb. What else could a dumb creature do that wished to be looked at with loving eyes and fondled?There it was entered, too, how when he was a “Bobby,” all little boys are “Bobbies,” he called himself Bobaysche, and said mejjible-bone for vegetable marrow. Desiring to speak of wheat, and unable to recall its proper term, he called it bread-seed; and one day stroking his favourite kitten asked “If God had a pussy?” It was difficult for him to express what time he meant, “When that yesterday that came yesterday went away,” was his paraphrase for the day before yesterday.One day in the sitting-room he fancied himself a hunter with a dart, and seizing the poker balanced it over his head. He became so excited he launched his dart at the flying quarry, and it went through the window-pane. In a day or two—workmen are not to be got in a hurry in the country—an old glazier trudged out to put in fresh glass, and while he cut out the dry putty and measured his glass, and drew the diamond point across, Bevis emptied his tool-basket and admired the chisels and hammers. By and by, tired of things which he was not permitted to use lest he should cut himself, he threw them in and handed the basket to the workman: “Here,” he said, “Here—take your toys!”Toys indeed. The old man had laboured fifty years with these toys till his mind had become with monotony as horny and unimpressionable as his hand. He smiled: he did not see the other meaning that those childish words convey.Nothing then pleased Bevis so much as moving furniture, the noise and disturbance so distasteful to us was a treat to him. It was “thunder-boy” and “cuckoo-boy,” as the thunder rolled or the cuckoo called; he could not conceive anything being caused unseen without human agency.The Deity was human.“Ah!” said he thoughtfully, “He got a high ladder and climbed up over the hedges to make the thunder.”“Has He got any little Bobbies?”“No.”“I suppose He had when He was down here?”“No.”“No,” (with pity) “He didn’t have no peoples.” The pleasure of refusal was not to be resisted.“Now do, Bobby, dear?”“I san’t: say it again.”“O!dodo it.”“I san’t: say it again.”“Now,do.”“I san’t,” shaking his head, as much as to say it’s very dreadful of me, but I shan’t. They could not explain to him that the glowing sunset was really so far away, he wanted to go to it. “It’s only just over the blackberry hedge.” Some one was teaching him that God loved little boys; “But does he love ladies too?”As for papa he had to tell stories by the hour, day after day, and when he ceased and said he could not remember any more, Bevis frowned. “Rack your brains! rack your brains!” said he. A nightingale built in the hedge near the house, and all night long her voice echoed in the bed room. Listening one night as he was in bed he remarked, “The nightingale has two songs: first he sings ‘Sir-rup—sir-rup,’ and then he sings ‘Tweet.’”For his impudence he had a box on the ear: “Pooh! It went pop like a foxglove,” he laughed.At Brighton he was taken over the Pavilion, and it was some trouble to explain to him that this fine house had been built for a gentleman called a king. By-and-by, in the top stories, rather musty from old carpets and hangings: “Hum!” said he; “seems stuffy. I can smell that gentleman’s dinner,” i.e. George the Fourth’s.Visiting a trim suburban villa, while the ladies talked they sent him out on the close-mown lawn to play. When he came in, “Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself?”“Don’t think much ofyourgarden,” said Bevis; “no buttercups.”At prayers: “Make Bobby a good boy, and see that you do everything I tell you.”“You longered your promise,” did not fulfil it for a long time. “Straight yourselves,” when out walking he wished them to go straight on and not turn. “Round yourselves, round yourselves,” when he wanted them to take a turning. When he grew up to be a big man he expressed his determination to “knock down the policeman and kill the hanging-man,” then he could do as he liked. “Tiffeck” was the cat’s cough.Driving over Westminster Bridge the first time, and seeing the Houses of Parliament, which reminded him of his toy bricks, he inquired “If there was anything inside?” Older people have asked that of late years. As he did not get his wishes quickly, it appeared to him there were “too many perhapses in this place:” he wanted things done “punctually at now.” A waterfall was the “tumbling water.”They told him there was one part of us that did not die. “Then,” he said directly, “I suppose that is the thinking part.” What more, O! Descartes, Plato, philosophers, is there in your tomes? The crucifixion hurt his feelings very much, the cruel nails, the unfeeling spear: he looked at the picture a long time, and then turned over the page, saying, “If God had been there He would not have let them do it.”“What are you going to be when you’re a man?” asked grandpa. “An engineer, a lawyer?”“Pooh! I’m going to be a king, and wear a gold crown!”A glowing March sunset made the tops of the elms, red with flower before the leaf, show clear against the sky. “They look like red seaweed dipped in water,” he said.Such were some of the short and disconnected jottings in mamma’s prayer-book: mere jottings, but well she could see the scene in her mind when the words were said. Latest of all, the second visit to the seaside, where, after rioting on the sands and hurling pebbles in the summer waves, suddenly he stopped, looked up at her and said, “O! wasn’t it a good thing the sea was made!” It was indeed.Every one being so much in the field, mamma was left alone, and wearying of it, asked Frances to come up frequently to her: Frances was willing enough to do so, especially as she could talk unreservedly of Big Jack, so that it was a pleasure to her to come. At last, on the Friday, as Bevis did not write again, his mother proposed that they should drive up to Jack’s, and see how the boys were on the morrow. Frances was discreetly delighted: Jack could not come down to see her just now, and with Bevis’s mother she could go up and see him with propriety. So it was agreed that the dog-cart should be ready early on Saturday afternoon. Charlie learned something of this—he played in and out the place, and waved his cap thrice as a warning.Now, in the kitchen on Friday evening there was a curious talk of Bevis and Mark. Had it not been for the harvest something would have crept out about them among the cottagers. Such inveterate gossipers would have sniffed out something, some one would have supposed this, another would have said they were not at Big Jack’s, a third might have caught a glimpse of them when on the mainland. But the harvest filled their hands with work, sealed their eyes, and shut their mouths. An earthquake would hardly disturb the reapers. So soon as they had completed the day’s work they fell asleep. Pan’s nocturnal rambles would have been noticed had it not been for this, though he might have come down from Jack’s.However, as it chanced, not a word was said till the Friday evening, when there came into the kitchen a labouring man, sent by his master to have some talk with the Bailiff respecting a proposed bargain. Every evening the Bailiff took his quart in the kitchen, and though it was summer always in the same corner by the hearth. He had no home, an old and much-crusted bachelor: he had a dim craving for company, and he liked to sit there and sip while Polly worked round briskly.A deal of gossip was got through in that kitchen. Men came in and out, they lingered on the door-step with their fingers on the latch just to add one more remark. That evening when the bargain, a minor matter, had been discussed, this man, with much roundabout preliminary solemnly declared that as he had been working up in Rushland’s field (about half a mile from the New Sea), he had distinctly heard Bevis and Mark talking to each other, and it seemed to him that the sound came over the water.Sometimes he said he could hear folk talk at a great distance, four or five times as far off as most could, and had frequently told people what they had been conversing about when they had been a mile or more away. He could not hear like this always, but once now and then, and he was quite sure that he had heard Master Bevis and Master Mark talking something about shooting, and that the sound came from over the water. He did not believe they were at Jack’s, there was “summat” (something) very curious about it.The Bailiff and Polly and the visitor turned this over and over, and gossiped, and discussed it for some time, till the man had to go. They never for a moment doubted the perfect truth of what he had stated. Half-educated people are always ready to believe the marvellous, nor was there anything so unusual in this claim to a second sight of hearing, so to say. Once now and then, in the country, you meet with people who lay serious claim to possess the power, and most astonishing instances are related of it.Whether being so much in the open air sharpens the senses, whether the sound actually did travel over the water, it is not possible to say, or whether some little suspicion of the real facts had got out, and this fellow cunningly devised his story knowing that sooner or later confirmation of his wonderful powers of hearing would be derived in the discovery of what Bevis had been doing. The only persons who could tell were John Young and Loo: the one was spell-bound by the bribe he knew he should obtain, Loo was much too eager to share the game to breathe a word. Poachers, however, get about at odd hours in odd places, and see things they are not meant to.Still in the country the belief lingers that here and there a person does possess the power, and the story so worked upon the Bailiff and Polly, that at last Polly ventured in to tell her mistress. Her mistress at once dismissed it as ridiculous. She was too well educated to dream dreams. Yet when she retired, do you know! she sat a little while and thought about it, so contagious is superstition. In the morning she sent down to Frances to come an hour earlier—she wanted to see Bevis.Frances came, and the dog-cart was at the door when Loo (who had been sent on an errand to the town—a common thing on Saturdays) rushed up to the door, thrust a letter into mamma’s hand, and darted away.“Why!” said she. “It’s Bevis—why!” she read aloud, Frances looking over her shoulder:—“Dear Mamma, Please come up to the place where the boats are kept directly you get this and mind you come this very minute,” (twice dashed). “We are coming home from New Formosa in our ship the Calypso, and want you to be there to see the things we have brought you, and to hear all about it. Mind and be sure and come this very minute, please.”Wondering and excited with curiosity, the two ladies ran as fast as they could up the meadow footpath, and along the bank of the New Sea, till they came to a clear place where the trees did not interfere with the view. Then, a long way up, they saw a singular-looking boat with a black sail.“There they are!”“They’re coming!”“Whatcanthey have been doing?”“That is not the Pinta!”“This has a black sail!”The sail was black because it was the rug, an old-fashioned one, black one side and grey the other. After long discussion Bevis and Mark had decided that the time had come when they must return from the island, for if Bevis’s mother went to Jack’s and found they were not there, her anxiety would be terrible, and they could not think of it. So Bevis wrote a letter and sent Loo back with it at once, and she was to watch and see if his mother did as she was asked. If she started for the shore Loo was to raise a signal, a handkerchief they lent her for the purpose.Some time after Loo went they embarked on the raft, and drifted slowly down before the south wind till they reached the Mozambique, where they stayed the raft’s progress with their poles till Loo displayed the signal. The sail was then hoisted, and they bore down right before the wind.With dark sail booming out the Calypso surged ahead, the mariners saw the two ladies on the shore, and waved their hands and shouted. Bevis steered her into port, and she grounded beside the Pinta. The first caress and astonishment over: “Where are your hats?” said Frances.“Where are your collars?” said his mother. “And gracious, child! just look at his neck!”As for hats and collars they had almost forgotten their existence, and having passed most of the time in shirt sleeves like gold-miners, with necks and chests exposed, they were as brown as if they had been in the tropics. Mark especially was tanned, completely tanned: Bevis was too fair to brown well. The sun and the wind had purified his skin almost to transparency with a rosy olive behind the whiteness. There was a gleam in his eye, the clear red of his lips—lips speak the state of the blood—the easy motion of the limbs, the ringing sound of the voice, the upright back, all showed primeval health. Both of them were often surprised at their own strength.In those days of running, racing, leaping, exploring, swimming, the skin nude to the sun, and wind and water, they built themselves up of steel, steel that would bear the hardest wear of the world. Had they been put in an open boat and thrust forth to sea like the viking of old, it would not have hurt them.Frances played with Bevis’s golden ringlets, but did not kiss him as she had used to do. He looked too much a man. She placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder, but did not speak to him as once she had done. Something told her that this was not the boy she ordered to and fro.They could not believe that the two had really spent all the time on an island. This was the eleventh morn since they had left—it could not be: yet there was the raft in evidence.“Let us row them up in the Pinta,” said Mark.“In a minute,” said Bevis. “Get her ready; I’ll be back in a minute—half a second.” He ran along the bank to a spot whence he knew he could see the old house at home through the boughs. He wanted just to look at it—there is no house so beautiful as the one you were born in—and then he ran back.There was a little water in the boat but not much, they hauled out some of the ballast, the ladies got in and were rowed direct to New Formosa. The stockade—so well defended, the cage before the door, the hut, the cave, their interest knew no bounds.“But you did not really sleep on this,” said Bevis’s mother in a tone of horror, finding the bed was nothing but fir branches: she could not be reconciled to the idea.The matchlock, the niche for the lantern, the marks where their fires had been, the sun-dial, there was no detail they did not examine: and lastly they went all round the island by the well-worn path. This occupied a considerable time, it was now too late to drive up to Jack’s and the object was removed, but Bevis’s mother, ever anxious for others’ happiness, whispered to Frances that she would write and send a messenger, and ask Jack to come down to-morrow—surely he could spare Sunday—to bring back the parcel, and see the wonderful island.When at last they landed the ladies, there was Charlie on the bank, and Cecil and Val, who had somehow got wind of it—they were wild with curiosity not unmingled with resentment. These had to be rowed to New Formosa and they stayed longer even than the ladies, and insisted on a shot each with the matchlock. So it was a most exciting afternoon for these returned shipwrecked folks. In the evening they had the dog-cart, and drove in to Latten with the otter to have it preserved.They did not see much or think much of the governor till towards supper-time—Mark had snatched half an hour to visit his Jolly Old Moke and returned like the wind. The governor was calmly incredulous: he professed to disbelieve that they had done it all themselves, there must have been a man or two to help them. And if it was true, how did they suppose they were going to pay for all the damage they had done to the trees on the island?This was a difficult question, they did not know that the governor could cut the trees if he chose, indeed they had never thought about it. But having faced so many dangers they were not going to tremble at this. They could not quite make the governor out, whether he was chaffing them, or whether he really disbelieved, or whether it was a cover to his anger. In truth, he hardly knew himself, but he could not help admiring the ingenuity with which they had effected all this.He was a shrewd man, the governor, and he saw that Bevis and Mark had the ladies on their side; what is the use of saying anything when the ladies have made up their minds? Besides, there was this about it at any rate: they had gained the primeval health of the primeval forest-dwellers. Before gleaming eyes, red lips, sun-burned and yet clear skin, ringing voices and shouts of laughter, how could he help but waver and finally melt and become as curious as the rest.In the end they actually promised, as a favour, to row him up to their island to-morrow.

Now, at the Other Side, i.e. at home, things had gone smoothly for them till the day before, in a measure owing to the harvest, and for the rest to the slow ways of old-fashioned country people. When they had gone away to Jack’s before in disgrace, Bevis’s mother could not rest, the ticking of the clock in the silent house, the distant beat of the blacksmith’s hammer, every little circumstance of the day jarred upon her. But on this occasion they had, she believed, gone for their own pleasure, and though she missed them, they were not apart and separated by a gulf of anger.

Busy with the harvest, there was no visiting, no one came down from Jack’s, and so the two slipped for the moment out of the life of the hamlet. Presently Bevis’s short but affectionate letter arrived, and prevented any suspicion arising, for no one noticed the postmark. Mamma wrote by return, and when her letter addressed to Bevis was delivered at Jack’s you would have supposed the secret would have come out. So it would in town life—a letter would have been written saying that Bevis was not there, and asking where to forward it.

But not so at the old house in the hills. Jack’s mother put it on the shelf, remarking that no doubt Bevis was coming, and would be there to-morrow or next day. As for Jack he was too busy to think about it, and if he had not been he would have taken little notice, knowing from former experience that Bevis might turn up at any moment. The letter remained on the shelf.

On the Saturday the carrier left a parcel for Bevis—at any other time a messenger would have been sent, and then their absence would have been discovered—but no one could be spared from the field. The parcel contained clean collars, cuffs, and similar things which they never thought of taking with them, but which mamma did not forget. Like the letter the parcel was put aside for Bevis when he did come; the parcel indeed was accepted as proof positive that he was coming. Jack’s mother never touched a pen if she could by any means avoid it, old country people put off letter-writing till absolutely compelled.

On the Sunday afternoon while Bevis and Mark were lying under the fir-trees in New Formosa, dear mamma, always thinking of her boy and his friend, was up in her bedroom turning over the yellowish fly-leaves at the end of an old Book of Common Prayer, too large to go to and fro to church, and which was always in the room. Upon these fly-leaves she had written down from time to time the curious little things that Bevis had said. In the very early morning (before he could talk) he used to sit up in the bed while she still slept, and try to pick her eyelids open with finger and thumb. What else could a dumb creature do that wished to be looked at with loving eyes and fondled?

There it was entered, too, how when he was a “Bobby,” all little boys are “Bobbies,” he called himself Bobaysche, and said mejjible-bone for vegetable marrow. Desiring to speak of wheat, and unable to recall its proper term, he called it bread-seed; and one day stroking his favourite kitten asked “If God had a pussy?” It was difficult for him to express what time he meant, “When that yesterday that came yesterday went away,” was his paraphrase for the day before yesterday.

One day in the sitting-room he fancied himself a hunter with a dart, and seizing the poker balanced it over his head. He became so excited he launched his dart at the flying quarry, and it went through the window-pane. In a day or two—workmen are not to be got in a hurry in the country—an old glazier trudged out to put in fresh glass, and while he cut out the dry putty and measured his glass, and drew the diamond point across, Bevis emptied his tool-basket and admired the chisels and hammers. By and by, tired of things which he was not permitted to use lest he should cut himself, he threw them in and handed the basket to the workman: “Here,” he said, “Here—take your toys!”

Toys indeed. The old man had laboured fifty years with these toys till his mind had become with monotony as horny and unimpressionable as his hand. He smiled: he did not see the other meaning that those childish words convey.

Nothing then pleased Bevis so much as moving furniture, the noise and disturbance so distasteful to us was a treat to him. It was “thunder-boy” and “cuckoo-boy,” as the thunder rolled or the cuckoo called; he could not conceive anything being caused unseen without human agency.

The Deity was human.

“Ah!” said he thoughtfully, “He got a high ladder and climbed up over the hedges to make the thunder.”

“Has He got any little Bobbies?”

“No.”

“I suppose He had when He was down here?”

“No.”

“No,” (with pity) “He didn’t have no peoples.” The pleasure of refusal was not to be resisted.

“Now do, Bobby, dear?”

“I san’t: say it again.”

“O!dodo it.”

“I san’t: say it again.”

“Now,do.”

“I san’t,” shaking his head, as much as to say it’s very dreadful of me, but I shan’t. They could not explain to him that the glowing sunset was really so far away, he wanted to go to it. “It’s only just over the blackberry hedge.” Some one was teaching him that God loved little boys; “But does he love ladies too?”

As for papa he had to tell stories by the hour, day after day, and when he ceased and said he could not remember any more, Bevis frowned. “Rack your brains! rack your brains!” said he. A nightingale built in the hedge near the house, and all night long her voice echoed in the bed room. Listening one night as he was in bed he remarked, “The nightingale has two songs: first he sings ‘Sir-rup—sir-rup,’ and then he sings ‘Tweet.’”

For his impudence he had a box on the ear: “Pooh! It went pop like a foxglove,” he laughed.

At Brighton he was taken over the Pavilion, and it was some trouble to explain to him that this fine house had been built for a gentleman called a king. By-and-by, in the top stories, rather musty from old carpets and hangings: “Hum!” said he; “seems stuffy. I can smell that gentleman’s dinner,” i.e. George the Fourth’s.

Visiting a trim suburban villa, while the ladies talked they sent him out on the close-mown lawn to play. When he came in, “Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself?”

“Don’t think much ofyourgarden,” said Bevis; “no buttercups.”

At prayers: “Make Bobby a good boy, and see that you do everything I tell you.”

“You longered your promise,” did not fulfil it for a long time. “Straight yourselves,” when out walking he wished them to go straight on and not turn. “Round yourselves, round yourselves,” when he wanted them to take a turning. When he grew up to be a big man he expressed his determination to “knock down the policeman and kill the hanging-man,” then he could do as he liked. “Tiffeck” was the cat’s cough.

Driving over Westminster Bridge the first time, and seeing the Houses of Parliament, which reminded him of his toy bricks, he inquired “If there was anything inside?” Older people have asked that of late years. As he did not get his wishes quickly, it appeared to him there were “too many perhapses in this place:” he wanted things done “punctually at now.” A waterfall was the “tumbling water.”

They told him there was one part of us that did not die. “Then,” he said directly, “I suppose that is the thinking part.” What more, O! Descartes, Plato, philosophers, is there in your tomes? The crucifixion hurt his feelings very much, the cruel nails, the unfeeling spear: he looked at the picture a long time, and then turned over the page, saying, “If God had been there He would not have let them do it.”

“What are you going to be when you’re a man?” asked grandpa. “An engineer, a lawyer?”

“Pooh! I’m going to be a king, and wear a gold crown!”

A glowing March sunset made the tops of the elms, red with flower before the leaf, show clear against the sky. “They look like red seaweed dipped in water,” he said.

Such were some of the short and disconnected jottings in mamma’s prayer-book: mere jottings, but well she could see the scene in her mind when the words were said. Latest of all, the second visit to the seaside, where, after rioting on the sands and hurling pebbles in the summer waves, suddenly he stopped, looked up at her and said, “O! wasn’t it a good thing the sea was made!” It was indeed.

Every one being so much in the field, mamma was left alone, and wearying of it, asked Frances to come up frequently to her: Frances was willing enough to do so, especially as she could talk unreservedly of Big Jack, so that it was a pleasure to her to come. At last, on the Friday, as Bevis did not write again, his mother proposed that they should drive up to Jack’s, and see how the boys were on the morrow. Frances was discreetly delighted: Jack could not come down to see her just now, and with Bevis’s mother she could go up and see him with propriety. So it was agreed that the dog-cart should be ready early on Saturday afternoon. Charlie learned something of this—he played in and out the place, and waved his cap thrice as a warning.

Now, in the kitchen on Friday evening there was a curious talk of Bevis and Mark. Had it not been for the harvest something would have crept out about them among the cottagers. Such inveterate gossipers would have sniffed out something, some one would have supposed this, another would have said they were not at Big Jack’s, a third might have caught a glimpse of them when on the mainland. But the harvest filled their hands with work, sealed their eyes, and shut their mouths. An earthquake would hardly disturb the reapers. So soon as they had completed the day’s work they fell asleep. Pan’s nocturnal rambles would have been noticed had it not been for this, though he might have come down from Jack’s.

However, as it chanced, not a word was said till the Friday evening, when there came into the kitchen a labouring man, sent by his master to have some talk with the Bailiff respecting a proposed bargain. Every evening the Bailiff took his quart in the kitchen, and though it was summer always in the same corner by the hearth. He had no home, an old and much-crusted bachelor: he had a dim craving for company, and he liked to sit there and sip while Polly worked round briskly.

A deal of gossip was got through in that kitchen. Men came in and out, they lingered on the door-step with their fingers on the latch just to add one more remark. That evening when the bargain, a minor matter, had been discussed, this man, with much roundabout preliminary solemnly declared that as he had been working up in Rushland’s field (about half a mile from the New Sea), he had distinctly heard Bevis and Mark talking to each other, and it seemed to him that the sound came over the water.

Sometimes he said he could hear folk talk at a great distance, four or five times as far off as most could, and had frequently told people what they had been conversing about when they had been a mile or more away. He could not hear like this always, but once now and then, and he was quite sure that he had heard Master Bevis and Master Mark talking something about shooting, and that the sound came from over the water. He did not believe they were at Jack’s, there was “summat” (something) very curious about it.

The Bailiff and Polly and the visitor turned this over and over, and gossiped, and discussed it for some time, till the man had to go. They never for a moment doubted the perfect truth of what he had stated. Half-educated people are always ready to believe the marvellous, nor was there anything so unusual in this claim to a second sight of hearing, so to say. Once now and then, in the country, you meet with people who lay serious claim to possess the power, and most astonishing instances are related of it.

Whether being so much in the open air sharpens the senses, whether the sound actually did travel over the water, it is not possible to say, or whether some little suspicion of the real facts had got out, and this fellow cunningly devised his story knowing that sooner or later confirmation of his wonderful powers of hearing would be derived in the discovery of what Bevis had been doing. The only persons who could tell were John Young and Loo: the one was spell-bound by the bribe he knew he should obtain, Loo was much too eager to share the game to breathe a word. Poachers, however, get about at odd hours in odd places, and see things they are not meant to.

Still in the country the belief lingers that here and there a person does possess the power, and the story so worked upon the Bailiff and Polly, that at last Polly ventured in to tell her mistress. Her mistress at once dismissed it as ridiculous. She was too well educated to dream dreams. Yet when she retired, do you know! she sat a little while and thought about it, so contagious is superstition. In the morning she sent down to Frances to come an hour earlier—she wanted to see Bevis.

Frances came, and the dog-cart was at the door when Loo (who had been sent on an errand to the town—a common thing on Saturdays) rushed up to the door, thrust a letter into mamma’s hand, and darted away.

“Why!” said she. “It’s Bevis—why!” she read aloud, Frances looking over her shoulder:—“Dear Mamma, Please come up to the place where the boats are kept directly you get this and mind you come this very minute,” (twice dashed). “We are coming home from New Formosa in our ship the Calypso, and want you to be there to see the things we have brought you, and to hear all about it. Mind and be sure and come this very minute, please.”

Wondering and excited with curiosity, the two ladies ran as fast as they could up the meadow footpath, and along the bank of the New Sea, till they came to a clear place where the trees did not interfere with the view. Then, a long way up, they saw a singular-looking boat with a black sail.

“There they are!”

“They’re coming!”

“Whatcanthey have been doing?”

“That is not the Pinta!”

“This has a black sail!”

The sail was black because it was the rug, an old-fashioned one, black one side and grey the other. After long discussion Bevis and Mark had decided that the time had come when they must return from the island, for if Bevis’s mother went to Jack’s and found they were not there, her anxiety would be terrible, and they could not think of it. So Bevis wrote a letter and sent Loo back with it at once, and she was to watch and see if his mother did as she was asked. If she started for the shore Loo was to raise a signal, a handkerchief they lent her for the purpose.

Some time after Loo went they embarked on the raft, and drifted slowly down before the south wind till they reached the Mozambique, where they stayed the raft’s progress with their poles till Loo displayed the signal. The sail was then hoisted, and they bore down right before the wind.

With dark sail booming out the Calypso surged ahead, the mariners saw the two ladies on the shore, and waved their hands and shouted. Bevis steered her into port, and she grounded beside the Pinta. The first caress and astonishment over: “Where are your hats?” said Frances.

“Where are your collars?” said his mother. “And gracious, child! just look at his neck!”

As for hats and collars they had almost forgotten their existence, and having passed most of the time in shirt sleeves like gold-miners, with necks and chests exposed, they were as brown as if they had been in the tropics. Mark especially was tanned, completely tanned: Bevis was too fair to brown well. The sun and the wind had purified his skin almost to transparency with a rosy olive behind the whiteness. There was a gleam in his eye, the clear red of his lips—lips speak the state of the blood—the easy motion of the limbs, the ringing sound of the voice, the upright back, all showed primeval health. Both of them were often surprised at their own strength.

In those days of running, racing, leaping, exploring, swimming, the skin nude to the sun, and wind and water, they built themselves up of steel, steel that would bear the hardest wear of the world. Had they been put in an open boat and thrust forth to sea like the viking of old, it would not have hurt them.

Frances played with Bevis’s golden ringlets, but did not kiss him as she had used to do. He looked too much a man. She placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder, but did not speak to him as once she had done. Something told her that this was not the boy she ordered to and fro.

They could not believe that the two had really spent all the time on an island. This was the eleventh morn since they had left—it could not be: yet there was the raft in evidence.

“Let us row them up in the Pinta,” said Mark.

“In a minute,” said Bevis. “Get her ready; I’ll be back in a minute—half a second.” He ran along the bank to a spot whence he knew he could see the old house at home through the boughs. He wanted just to look at it—there is no house so beautiful as the one you were born in—and then he ran back.

There was a little water in the boat but not much, they hauled out some of the ballast, the ladies got in and were rowed direct to New Formosa. The stockade—so well defended, the cage before the door, the hut, the cave, their interest knew no bounds.

“But you did not really sleep on this,” said Bevis’s mother in a tone of horror, finding the bed was nothing but fir branches: she could not be reconciled to the idea.

The matchlock, the niche for the lantern, the marks where their fires had been, the sun-dial, there was no detail they did not examine: and lastly they went all round the island by the well-worn path. This occupied a considerable time, it was now too late to drive up to Jack’s and the object was removed, but Bevis’s mother, ever anxious for others’ happiness, whispered to Frances that she would write and send a messenger, and ask Jack to come down to-morrow—surely he could spare Sunday—to bring back the parcel, and see the wonderful island.

When at last they landed the ladies, there was Charlie on the bank, and Cecil and Val, who had somehow got wind of it—they were wild with curiosity not unmingled with resentment. These had to be rowed to New Formosa and they stayed longer even than the ladies, and insisted on a shot each with the matchlock. So it was a most exciting afternoon for these returned shipwrecked folks. In the evening they had the dog-cart, and drove in to Latten with the otter to have it preserved.

They did not see much or think much of the governor till towards supper-time—Mark had snatched half an hour to visit his Jolly Old Moke and returned like the wind. The governor was calmly incredulous: he professed to disbelieve that they had done it all themselves, there must have been a man or two to help them. And if it was true, how did they suppose they were going to pay for all the damage they had done to the trees on the island?

This was a difficult question, they did not know that the governor could cut the trees if he chose, indeed they had never thought about it. But having faced so many dangers they were not going to tremble at this. They could not quite make the governor out, whether he was chaffing them, or whether he really disbelieved, or whether it was a cover to his anger. In truth, he hardly knew himself, but he could not help admiring the ingenuity with which they had effected all this.

He was a shrewd man, the governor, and he saw that Bevis and Mark had the ladies on their side; what is the use of saying anything when the ladies have made up their minds? Besides, there was this about it at any rate: they had gained the primeval health of the primeval forest-dwellers. Before gleaming eyes, red lips, sun-burned and yet clear skin, ringing voices and shouts of laughter, how could he help but waver and finally melt and become as curious as the rest.

In the end they actually promised, as a favour, to row him up to their island to-morrow.

Volume Three—Chapter Sixteen.Shooting with Double-Barrels.The governor having been rowed to the island, examined the fortifications, read the journal, and looked at the iron-pipe gun, and afterwards reflecting upon these things came to the conclusion that it would be safer and better in every way to let Bevis have the use of a good breech-loader. He evidently must shoot, and if so he had better shoot with a proper gun. When this decision was known, Mark’s governor could do nothing less, and so they both had good guns put into their hands.In truth, the prohibition had long been rather hollow, more traditional than effectual. Bevis had accompanied his governor several autumns in the field, and shot occasionally, and he had been frequently allowed to try his skill at the starlings flying to and fro the chimney. Besides which they shot with Jack and knew all about it perfectly well. They were fortunate in living in the era of the breech-loader which is so much safer than the old muzzle-loading gun. There was hardly a part of the muzzle-loader which in some way or other did not now and then contribute to accidents. With the breech-loader you can in a moment remove the very possibility of accident by pulling out the cartridges and putting them in your pocket.Bevis and Mark knew very well how to shoot, both from actual if occasional practice, and from watching those who did shoot. The governor, however, desirous that they should excel, gave them a good drilling in this way.Bevis had to study his position at the moment when he stopped and lifted the gun. His left foot was to be set a little in front of the other, and he was to turn very slightly aside, the left shoulder forwards. He was never to stand square to the game. He was to stand upright, perfectly upright like a bolt. The back must not stoop nor the shoulders be humped and set up till the collar of the coat was as high as the poll. Humping the shoulders at the same time contracts the chest, and causes the coat in front to crease, and these creases are apt to catch the butt of the gun as it comes to the shoulder and divert it from its proper place.There is no time to correct this in the act of shooting, so that the habit of a good position should be acquired that it may be avoided. He had, too, to hold his head nearly upright and not to crane his neck forward till the cheek rested on the stock while the head was aside in the manner of the magpie peering into a letter. He was to stand upright, with his chest open and his shoulders thrown back, like Robin Hood with his six foot yew drawing the arrow to his ear.Bevis was made to take his double-barrel upstairs, into the best bedroom—this is the advantage of the breech-loader, take the cartridges out and it is as harmless as a fire-iron—where there was a modern cheval-glass. The mirrors down stairs were old and small, and the glass not perfectly homogeneous so that unless the reflection of the face fell just in the centre a round chin became elongated. Before the cheval-glass he was ordered to stand sideways and throw up the gun quickly to the present, then holding it there, to glance at himself.He saw his frame arched forward, his back bent, his shoulders drawn together, the collar of his coat up to his poll behind, the entire position cramped and awkward. Now he understood how unsightly it looked, and how difficult it is to shoot well in that way. Many good sportsmen by dint of twenty years’ cramping educate their awkwardness to a successful pitch. It needs many years to do it: but you can stand upright at once.He altered his posture in a moment, looked, and saw himself standing easily, upright but easily, and found that his heart beat without vibrating the barrel as it will if the chest be contracted, and that breathing did not throw the gun out of level. Instead of compressing himself to the gun, the gun fitted to him. The gun had been his master and controlled him, now he was the master of the gun.Next he had to practise the bringing of the gun to the shoulder—the act of lifting it—and to choose the position from which he would usually lift it. He had his free choice, but was informed that when once he had selected it he must adhere to it. Some generally carry the gun on the hollow of the left arm with the muzzle nearly horizontal to the left. Some under the right arm with the left hand already on the stock. Some with the muzzle upwards aslant with both hands also. Now and then one waits with the butt on his hip: one swings his gun anyhow in one hand like an umbrella: a third tosses it over his shoulder with the hammers down and the trigger-guard up, and jerks the muzzle over when the game rises. Except in snap-shooting, when the gun must of necessity be held already half-way to the shoulder, it matters very little which the sportsman does, nor from what position he raises his gun.But the governor insisted that it did matter everything that the position should be habitual. That in order to shoot with success, the gun must not be thrown up now one way and now another, but must almost invariably, certainly as a rule, be lifted from one recognised position. Else so many trifling circumstances interfere with the precision without which nothing can be done, a crease of the coat, a button, the sleeve, or you might, forgetting yourself, knock the barrel against a bough.To avoid these you must take your mind from the game to guide your gun to the shoulder. If you took your mind from the game the continuity of the glance was broken, and the aim snapped in two, not to be united. Therefore, he insisted on Bevis choosing a position in which he would habitually carry his gun when in the presence of game.Bevis at once selected that with the gun in the hollow of his left arm, the muzzle somewhat upwards; this was simply imitation, because the governor held it in that way. It is, however, a good position, easy for walking or waiting for ground game or for game that flies, for hare or snipe, for everything except thick cover or brushwood, or moving in a double mound, when you must perforce hold the gun almost perpendicular before you to escape the branches. This being settled, and the governor having promised him faithfully that if he saw him carry it any other way he would lock the gun up for a week each time, they proceeded to practise the bringing of the gun up to the shoulder, that is, to the present.The left hand should always grasp the stock at the spot where the gun balances, where it can be poised on the palm like the beam of weights and scales. Instead of now taking it just in front of the trigger-guard, now on the trigger-guard, now six or seven inches in front, carelessly seizing it in different places as it happens, the left hand should always come to the same spot. It will do so undeviatingly with a very little practice and without thought or effort, as your right hand meets your friend’s to shake hands.If it comes always to the same spot the left hand does not require shifting after the butt touches the shoulder. The necessary movements are reduced to a minimum. Grasping it then at the balance lift it gently to the shoulder, neither hastily nor slowly, but with quiet ease. Bevis was particularly taught not to throw the butt against his shoulder with a jerk, he was to bring it up with the deliberate motion of “hefting.”“Hefting” is weighing in the hands—you are asked to “heft” a thing—to take it and feel by raising it what you think it weighs.With this considerate ease Bevis was to “heft” his gun to the shoulder, and only to press it there sufficiently to feel that the butt touched him. He was not to hold it loosely, nor to pull it against his shoulder as if he were going to mortice it there. He was just to feel it. If you press the gun with a hard iron stiffness against the shoulder you cannot move it to follow the flying bird: you pull against and resist yourself. On the other hand, if loosely held the gun is apt to shift.The butt must touch his shoulder at the same place every time. Those who have not had this pointed out to them frequently have the thick or upper part of the butt high above the shoulder, and really put nothing but the narrow and angular lower part against the body. At another time, throwing it too low, they have to bend and stoop over the gun to get an aim. Or it is pitched up to the chest, and not to the shoulder at all—to the edge of the chest, or again to the outside of the shoulder on the arm. They never bring it twice to the same place and must consequently change the inclination of the head at every shot. A fresh effort has, therefore, to be gone through each time to get the body and the gun to fit.Bevis was compelled to bring the butt of his gun up every time to the same spot well on his shoulder, between his chest and his arm, with the hollow of the butt fitting, like a ball in its socket. One of the great objects of this mechanical training was that he should not have to pay the least attention to the breech of the gun in aiming. All that he had to do with was the sight. His gun, when he had thus practised, came up exactly level at once.It required no shifting, no moving of the left hand further up or lower down the stock, no pushing of the butt higher up the shoulder, or to this side or that. His gun touched his shoulder at a perfect level, as straight as if he had thrust out his hand and pointed with the index finger at the bird. Not the least conscious effort was needed, there was nothing to correct, above all there was not a second’s interruption of the continuity of glance—the look at the game. The breech was level with the sight instantly; all he had further to do with was the sight.With both eyes open he never lost view of the bird for the tenth of a second. The governor taught him to keep his eyes, both open, on the bird as it flew, and his gun came up to his line of sight. The black dot at the end of the barrel—as the sight appears in the act of shooting—had then only to cover the bird, and the finger pressed the trigger. Up to the moment that the black dot was adjusted to the mark all was automatic.The governor’s plan was first to reduce the movements to a minimum; secondly, to obtain absolute uniformity of movement; thirdly, to secure by this absolute uniformity a perfect unconsciousness of effort of movement at all; in short, automatic movement; and all this in order that the continuity of glance, the look at the game, might not be interrupted for the merest fraction of a second. That glance was really the aim, the gun fitted itself to the gaze just as you thrust out your index finger and point, the body really did the work of aiming itself.All the mind had to do was to effect the final adjustment of the black dot of the sight. Very often when the gun was thus brought up no such adjustment was necessary, it was already there, so that there was nothing to do but press the trigger. It then looked as if the gun touched the shoulder and was discharged instantaneously.He was to look at the bird, to keep both eyes on it, to let his gun come to his eyes, still both open, adjust the dot and fire. There was no binocular trouble because he was never to stay to run his eyes up the barrels—that would necessitate removing his glance from the game, a thing strictly forbidden. Only the dot. He saw only the dot, and the dot gave no binocular trouble. The barrels were entirely ignored; the body had already adjusted them. Only the dot. The sight—this dot—is the secret of shooting.The governor said if you shut the left eye you cannot retain your glance on the bird, the barrels invariably obscure it for a moment, and the mind has to catch itself again. He would not let Bevis take his eyes off it—he would rather he missed. Bevis was also to be careful not to let his right hand hang with all the weight of his arm on the stock, a thing which doubles the labour of the left arm as it has to uphold the weight of the gun and of the right arm too, and thus the muzzle is apt to be depressed.He was not to blink, but to look through the explosion. Hundreds of sportsmen blink as they pull the trigger. He was to let his gun smoothly follow the bird, even in the act of the explosion, exactly as the astronomer’s clockwork equatorial follows a star. There was to be continuity of glance; and thus at last he brought down his snipes right and left, as it seemed, with a sweep of the gun.The astronomers discovered “personal equation.” Three men are set to observe the occultation of a satellite by Jupiter, and to record the precise time by pressing a lever. One presses the lever the hundredth of a second too soon, the second the hundredth of a second too late, the third sometimes one and sometimes the other and sometimes is precisely accurate. The mean of these three gives the exact time. In shooting one man pulls the trigger a fraction too soon, another a fraction too late, a third is uncertain. If you have been doing your best to shoot well, and after some years still fail, endeavour to discover your “personal equation,” and by correcting that you may succeed much better. It is a common error and unsuspected, so is blinking—you may shoot for years and never know that you blink.Bevis’s personal equation was a second too quick. In this, as in everything, he dashed at it. His snipes were cut down as if you had whipped them over: his hares were mangled; his partridges smashed. The dot was dead on them, and a volley of lead was poured in. The governor had a difficulty to get him to give “law” enough.He acquired the mechanical precision so perfectly that he became careless and shot gracelessly. The governor lectured him and hung his gun up for a week as a check. By degrees he got into the easy quiet style of finished shooting.The two learned the better and the quicker because there were two. The governor went through the same drill with Mark, motion for motion, word for word. Then when they were out in the field the one told the other, they compared their experiences, checked each other’s faults, and commended success. They learned the better and the quicker because they had no keeper to find everything for them, and warn them when to expect a hare, and when a bird. They had to find it for themselves like Pan. Finally, they learned the better because at first they shot at anything that took their fancy, a blackbird or a wood-pigeon, and were not restricted to one class of bird with the same kind of motion every time it was flushed.Long before trusted with guns they had gathered from the conversation they constantly heard around them to aim over a bird that flies straight away because it usually rises gradually for some distance, and between the ears of the running hare. If the hare came towards them they shot at the grass before his paws. A bird flying aslant away needs the sight to be put in front of it, the allowance increasing as the angle approaches a right angle; till when a bird crosses, straight across, you must allow a good piece, especially if he comes with the wind.Two cautions the governor only gave them, one to be extremely careful in getting through hedges that the muzzles of their guns pointed away, for branches are most treacherous, and secondly never to put the forefinger inside the trigger-guard till in the act of lifting the gun to the shoulder.For awhile their territory was limited as the governor, who shot with Mark’s, did not want the sport spoiled by these beginners. But as September drew to a close, they could wander almost where they liked, and in October anywhere, on promise of not shooting pheasants should they come across any.

The governor having been rowed to the island, examined the fortifications, read the journal, and looked at the iron-pipe gun, and afterwards reflecting upon these things came to the conclusion that it would be safer and better in every way to let Bevis have the use of a good breech-loader. He evidently must shoot, and if so he had better shoot with a proper gun. When this decision was known, Mark’s governor could do nothing less, and so they both had good guns put into their hands.

In truth, the prohibition had long been rather hollow, more traditional than effectual. Bevis had accompanied his governor several autumns in the field, and shot occasionally, and he had been frequently allowed to try his skill at the starlings flying to and fro the chimney. Besides which they shot with Jack and knew all about it perfectly well. They were fortunate in living in the era of the breech-loader which is so much safer than the old muzzle-loading gun. There was hardly a part of the muzzle-loader which in some way or other did not now and then contribute to accidents. With the breech-loader you can in a moment remove the very possibility of accident by pulling out the cartridges and putting them in your pocket.

Bevis and Mark knew very well how to shoot, both from actual if occasional practice, and from watching those who did shoot. The governor, however, desirous that they should excel, gave them a good drilling in this way.

Bevis had to study his position at the moment when he stopped and lifted the gun. His left foot was to be set a little in front of the other, and he was to turn very slightly aside, the left shoulder forwards. He was never to stand square to the game. He was to stand upright, perfectly upright like a bolt. The back must not stoop nor the shoulders be humped and set up till the collar of the coat was as high as the poll. Humping the shoulders at the same time contracts the chest, and causes the coat in front to crease, and these creases are apt to catch the butt of the gun as it comes to the shoulder and divert it from its proper place.

There is no time to correct this in the act of shooting, so that the habit of a good position should be acquired that it may be avoided. He had, too, to hold his head nearly upright and not to crane his neck forward till the cheek rested on the stock while the head was aside in the manner of the magpie peering into a letter. He was to stand upright, with his chest open and his shoulders thrown back, like Robin Hood with his six foot yew drawing the arrow to his ear.

Bevis was made to take his double-barrel upstairs, into the best bedroom—this is the advantage of the breech-loader, take the cartridges out and it is as harmless as a fire-iron—where there was a modern cheval-glass. The mirrors down stairs were old and small, and the glass not perfectly homogeneous so that unless the reflection of the face fell just in the centre a round chin became elongated. Before the cheval-glass he was ordered to stand sideways and throw up the gun quickly to the present, then holding it there, to glance at himself.

He saw his frame arched forward, his back bent, his shoulders drawn together, the collar of his coat up to his poll behind, the entire position cramped and awkward. Now he understood how unsightly it looked, and how difficult it is to shoot well in that way. Many good sportsmen by dint of twenty years’ cramping educate their awkwardness to a successful pitch. It needs many years to do it: but you can stand upright at once.

He altered his posture in a moment, looked, and saw himself standing easily, upright but easily, and found that his heart beat without vibrating the barrel as it will if the chest be contracted, and that breathing did not throw the gun out of level. Instead of compressing himself to the gun, the gun fitted to him. The gun had been his master and controlled him, now he was the master of the gun.

Next he had to practise the bringing of the gun to the shoulder—the act of lifting it—and to choose the position from which he would usually lift it. He had his free choice, but was informed that when once he had selected it he must adhere to it. Some generally carry the gun on the hollow of the left arm with the muzzle nearly horizontal to the left. Some under the right arm with the left hand already on the stock. Some with the muzzle upwards aslant with both hands also. Now and then one waits with the butt on his hip: one swings his gun anyhow in one hand like an umbrella: a third tosses it over his shoulder with the hammers down and the trigger-guard up, and jerks the muzzle over when the game rises. Except in snap-shooting, when the gun must of necessity be held already half-way to the shoulder, it matters very little which the sportsman does, nor from what position he raises his gun.

But the governor insisted that it did matter everything that the position should be habitual. That in order to shoot with success, the gun must not be thrown up now one way and now another, but must almost invariably, certainly as a rule, be lifted from one recognised position. Else so many trifling circumstances interfere with the precision without which nothing can be done, a crease of the coat, a button, the sleeve, or you might, forgetting yourself, knock the barrel against a bough.

To avoid these you must take your mind from the game to guide your gun to the shoulder. If you took your mind from the game the continuity of the glance was broken, and the aim snapped in two, not to be united. Therefore, he insisted on Bevis choosing a position in which he would habitually carry his gun when in the presence of game.

Bevis at once selected that with the gun in the hollow of his left arm, the muzzle somewhat upwards; this was simply imitation, because the governor held it in that way. It is, however, a good position, easy for walking or waiting for ground game or for game that flies, for hare or snipe, for everything except thick cover or brushwood, or moving in a double mound, when you must perforce hold the gun almost perpendicular before you to escape the branches. This being settled, and the governor having promised him faithfully that if he saw him carry it any other way he would lock the gun up for a week each time, they proceeded to practise the bringing of the gun up to the shoulder, that is, to the present.

The left hand should always grasp the stock at the spot where the gun balances, where it can be poised on the palm like the beam of weights and scales. Instead of now taking it just in front of the trigger-guard, now on the trigger-guard, now six or seven inches in front, carelessly seizing it in different places as it happens, the left hand should always come to the same spot. It will do so undeviatingly with a very little practice and without thought or effort, as your right hand meets your friend’s to shake hands.

If it comes always to the same spot the left hand does not require shifting after the butt touches the shoulder. The necessary movements are reduced to a minimum. Grasping it then at the balance lift it gently to the shoulder, neither hastily nor slowly, but with quiet ease. Bevis was particularly taught not to throw the butt against his shoulder with a jerk, he was to bring it up with the deliberate motion of “hefting.”

“Hefting” is weighing in the hands—you are asked to “heft” a thing—to take it and feel by raising it what you think it weighs.

With this considerate ease Bevis was to “heft” his gun to the shoulder, and only to press it there sufficiently to feel that the butt touched him. He was not to hold it loosely, nor to pull it against his shoulder as if he were going to mortice it there. He was just to feel it. If you press the gun with a hard iron stiffness against the shoulder you cannot move it to follow the flying bird: you pull against and resist yourself. On the other hand, if loosely held the gun is apt to shift.

The butt must touch his shoulder at the same place every time. Those who have not had this pointed out to them frequently have the thick or upper part of the butt high above the shoulder, and really put nothing but the narrow and angular lower part against the body. At another time, throwing it too low, they have to bend and stoop over the gun to get an aim. Or it is pitched up to the chest, and not to the shoulder at all—to the edge of the chest, or again to the outside of the shoulder on the arm. They never bring it twice to the same place and must consequently change the inclination of the head at every shot. A fresh effort has, therefore, to be gone through each time to get the body and the gun to fit.

Bevis was compelled to bring the butt of his gun up every time to the same spot well on his shoulder, between his chest and his arm, with the hollow of the butt fitting, like a ball in its socket. One of the great objects of this mechanical training was that he should not have to pay the least attention to the breech of the gun in aiming. All that he had to do with was the sight. His gun, when he had thus practised, came up exactly level at once.

It required no shifting, no moving of the left hand further up or lower down the stock, no pushing of the butt higher up the shoulder, or to this side or that. His gun touched his shoulder at a perfect level, as straight as if he had thrust out his hand and pointed with the index finger at the bird. Not the least conscious effort was needed, there was nothing to correct, above all there was not a second’s interruption of the continuity of glance—the look at the game. The breech was level with the sight instantly; all he had further to do with was the sight.

With both eyes open he never lost view of the bird for the tenth of a second. The governor taught him to keep his eyes, both open, on the bird as it flew, and his gun came up to his line of sight. The black dot at the end of the barrel—as the sight appears in the act of shooting—had then only to cover the bird, and the finger pressed the trigger. Up to the moment that the black dot was adjusted to the mark all was automatic.

The governor’s plan was first to reduce the movements to a minimum; secondly, to obtain absolute uniformity of movement; thirdly, to secure by this absolute uniformity a perfect unconsciousness of effort of movement at all; in short, automatic movement; and all this in order that the continuity of glance, the look at the game, might not be interrupted for the merest fraction of a second. That glance was really the aim, the gun fitted itself to the gaze just as you thrust out your index finger and point, the body really did the work of aiming itself.

All the mind had to do was to effect the final adjustment of the black dot of the sight. Very often when the gun was thus brought up no such adjustment was necessary, it was already there, so that there was nothing to do but press the trigger. It then looked as if the gun touched the shoulder and was discharged instantaneously.

He was to look at the bird, to keep both eyes on it, to let his gun come to his eyes, still both open, adjust the dot and fire. There was no binocular trouble because he was never to stay to run his eyes up the barrels—that would necessitate removing his glance from the game, a thing strictly forbidden. Only the dot. He saw only the dot, and the dot gave no binocular trouble. The barrels were entirely ignored; the body had already adjusted them. Only the dot. The sight—this dot—is the secret of shooting.

The governor said if you shut the left eye you cannot retain your glance on the bird, the barrels invariably obscure it for a moment, and the mind has to catch itself again. He would not let Bevis take his eyes off it—he would rather he missed. Bevis was also to be careful not to let his right hand hang with all the weight of his arm on the stock, a thing which doubles the labour of the left arm as it has to uphold the weight of the gun and of the right arm too, and thus the muzzle is apt to be depressed.

He was not to blink, but to look through the explosion. Hundreds of sportsmen blink as they pull the trigger. He was to let his gun smoothly follow the bird, even in the act of the explosion, exactly as the astronomer’s clockwork equatorial follows a star. There was to be continuity of glance; and thus at last he brought down his snipes right and left, as it seemed, with a sweep of the gun.

The astronomers discovered “personal equation.” Three men are set to observe the occultation of a satellite by Jupiter, and to record the precise time by pressing a lever. One presses the lever the hundredth of a second too soon, the second the hundredth of a second too late, the third sometimes one and sometimes the other and sometimes is precisely accurate. The mean of these three gives the exact time. In shooting one man pulls the trigger a fraction too soon, another a fraction too late, a third is uncertain. If you have been doing your best to shoot well, and after some years still fail, endeavour to discover your “personal equation,” and by correcting that you may succeed much better. It is a common error and unsuspected, so is blinking—you may shoot for years and never know that you blink.

Bevis’s personal equation was a second too quick. In this, as in everything, he dashed at it. His snipes were cut down as if you had whipped them over: his hares were mangled; his partridges smashed. The dot was dead on them, and a volley of lead was poured in. The governor had a difficulty to get him to give “law” enough.

He acquired the mechanical precision so perfectly that he became careless and shot gracelessly. The governor lectured him and hung his gun up for a week as a check. By degrees he got into the easy quiet style of finished shooting.

The two learned the better and the quicker because there were two. The governor went through the same drill with Mark, motion for motion, word for word. Then when they were out in the field the one told the other, they compared their experiences, checked each other’s faults, and commended success. They learned the better and the quicker because they had no keeper to find everything for them, and warn them when to expect a hare, and when a bird. They had to find it for themselves like Pan. Finally, they learned the better because at first they shot at anything that took their fancy, a blackbird or a wood-pigeon, and were not restricted to one class of bird with the same kind of motion every time it was flushed.

Long before trusted with guns they had gathered from the conversation they constantly heard around them to aim over a bird that flies straight away because it usually rises gradually for some distance, and between the ears of the running hare. If the hare came towards them they shot at the grass before his paws. A bird flying aslant away needs the sight to be put in front of it, the allowance increasing as the angle approaches a right angle; till when a bird crosses, straight across, you must allow a good piece, especially if he comes with the wind.

Two cautions the governor only gave them, one to be extremely careful in getting through hedges that the muzzles of their guns pointed away, for branches are most treacherous, and secondly never to put the forefinger inside the trigger-guard till in the act of lifting the gun to the shoulder.

For awhile their territory was limited as the governor, who shot with Mark’s, did not want the sport spoiled by these beginners. But as September drew to a close, they could wander almost where they liked, and in October anywhere, on promise of not shooting pheasants should they come across any.

Volume Three—Chapter Seventeen.American Snap-Shooting.Meantime they taught Big Jack to swim. He came down to look at the cave on New Formosa, and Frances so taunted and tormented him because the boys could swim and he could not, that at last the giant, as it were, heaved himself up for the effort, and rode down every morning. Bevis and Mark gave him lessons, and in a fortnight he could swim four or five strokes to the railings. Directly he had the stroke he got on rapidly, for those vast lungs of his, formed by the air of the hills, floated him as buoyantly as a balloon. So soon as ever he could swim, Frances turned round and tormented him because the boys had taught him and not he the boys.Bevis and Mark could not break off the habit of bathing every morning, and they continued to do so far into October, often walking with bare feet on the hoar-frost on the grass, and breaking the thin ice at the edge of the water by tapping it with their toes. The bath was now only a plunge and out again, but it gave them a pleasant glow all day, and hardened them as the smith hardens iron.Up at Jack’s they tried again with his little rifle, and applying what they had learnt from the matchlock while shooting with ball, soon found out the rifle’s peculiarities. It only wanted to be understood and coaxed like everything else. Then they could hit anything with it up to sixty yards. Beyond that the bullet, being beaten out of shape when driven home by the ramrod, could not be depended upon. In October they could shoot where they pleased on condition of sparing the pheasants for their governors. There were no preserved covers, but a few pheasants wandered away and came there. October was a beautiful month.One morning Tom, the ploughboy, and some time bird-keeper, came to the door and asked to see them. “There be a pussy in the mound,” he said, with the sly leer peculiar to those who bring information about game. He “knowed” there was a hare in the mound, and yet he could not have given any positive reason for it. He had not actually seen the hare enter the mound, nor found the run, nor the form, neither had he Pan’s intelligent nostrils, but he “knowed” it all the same.Rude as he looked he had an instinctive perception—supersensuous perception—that there was a hare on that mound, which twenty people might have passed without the least suspicion. “Go into the kitchen,” said Bevis, and Tom went with a broad smile of content on his features, for he well knew that to be sent into the kitchen was equivalent to a cheque drawn on the cellar and the pantry.Bevis and Mark took their guns, Pan followed very happily, and they walked beside the hedges down towards the place, which was at some distance. The keenness of the morning air, from which the sun had not yet fully distilled the frost of the night, freshened their eagerness for sport. A cart laden with swedes crossed in front of them, and though the sun shone the load of roots indicated that winter was approaching. They passed an oak growing out in the field.Under the tree there stood an aged man with one hand against the hoary trunk, and looking up into the tree as well as his bowed back, which had stiffened in its stoop, and his rounded shoulders would let him. His dress was old and sober tinted, his smock frock greyish, his old hat had lost all colour. He was hoary like the lichen-hung oak trunk. From his face the blood had dried away, leaving it a dull brown, the tan of seventy harvest fields burned into the skin, a sapless brown wrinkled face like a withered oak leaf.Though he looked at them, and Bevis nodded, his eyes gave no sign of recognition; like a dead animal’s, there was no light in them, the glaze was settling. In the evening it might occur to him that he had seen them in the morning. His years pressed heavy on him, very heavy like a huge bundle of sticks; he was lost under his age. All those years “Jumps” had never once been out of sight of the high Down yonder (not far from Jack’s), the landmark of the place. Within sight of that hill he was born, within such radius he had laboured, and therein he was decaying, slowly, very slowly, like an oak branch. James was his real name, corrupted to “Jumps;” as “Jumps” he had been known for two generations, and he would have answered to no other.One day it happened that “Jumps” searching for dead sticks came along under the sycamore-trees and saw Jack, and Bevis and Mark swimming. He watched them some time with his dull glazing eyes, and a day or two afterwards opened his mouth about it. “Never seed nobody do thuck afore,” he said, repeating it a score of times as his class do, impressing an idea on others by reiteration, as it takes so much iteration to impress it on them. “Never saw any one do that before.”For seventy harvests he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis’s governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about those waters, not one had learned to swim. Very likely no one had learned since the Norman conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonalty forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer, and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller and not a home-staying man.Tom, the ploughboy and bird-keeper, with his companions, the other plough-lads and young men, sometimes bathed in summer in the brook far down the meadows, splashing like blackbirds in the shallow water, running to and fro on the sward under the grey-leaved willows with the sunshine on their limbs. I delight to see them, they look Greek; I wish some one would paint them, with the brimming brook, the willows pondering over it, the pointed flags, the sward, and buttercups, the distant flesh-tints in the sunlight under the grey leaves. But this was not swimming. “Never saw any one do that before,” said the man of seventy harvests.Under the oak he stood as Bevis and Mark passed that October morning. His hand was like wood upon wood, and as he leaned against the oak, his knees were bent one way and his back the other, and thus stiff and crooked and standing with an effort supported by the tree, it seemed as if he had been going as a beast of the field upon all fours and had hoisted himself upright with difficulty. Something in the position, in the hoary tree, and the greyish hue of his dress gave the impression of an arboreal animal.But against the tree there leaned also a long slender pole, “teeled up” as “Jumps” would have said, and at the end of the pole was a hook. The old man had permission to collect the dead wood, and the use of his crook was to tear down the decaying branches for which he was now looking. A crook is a very simple instrument—the mere branch of a tree will often serve as a crook—but no arboreal animal has ever used a crook. Ah! “Jumps,” poor decaying “Jumps,” with lengthened narrow experience like a long footpath, with glazing eyes, crooked knee, and stiffened back, there was a something in thee for all that, the unseen difference that is all in all, the wondrous mind, the soul.Up in the sunshine a lark sung fluttering his wings; he arose from the earth, his heart was in the sky. Shall not the soul arise?Past the oak Bevis and Mark walked beside the hedge upon their way. Frost, and sunshine after had reddened the hawthorn sprays, and already they could see through the upper branches—red with haws—for the grass was strewn with the leaves from the exposed tops of the bushes. On the orange maples there were bunches of rosy-winged keys. There was a gloss on the holly leaf, and catkins at the tips of the leafless birch. As the leaves fell from the horse-chestnut boughs the varnished sheaths of the buds for next year appeared; so there were green buds on the willows, black tips to the ash saplings, green buds on the sycamores. They waited asleep in their sheaths till Orion strode the southern sky and Arcturus rose in the East.Slender larch boughs were coated with the yellow fluff of the decaying needles. Brown fern, shrivelled rush tip, grey rowen grass at the verge of the ditch showed that frost had wandered thither in the night. By the pond the brown bur-marigolds drooped, withering to seed, their dull disks like lesser sunflowers without the sunflower’s colour. There was a beech which had been orange, but was now red from the topmost branch to the lowest, redder than the squirrels which came to it. Two or three last buttercups flowered in the grass, and on a furze bush there were a few pale yellow blossoms not golden as in spring, but pale.Thin threads of gossamer gleamed, the light ran along their loops as they were lifted by the breeze, and the sky was blue over the buff oaks. Jays screeched in the oaks looking for acorns, and there came the muffled tinkle of a sheep-bell. A humble-bee buzzed across their path, warmed into aimless life by the sun from his frost-chill of the night—buzzed across and drifted against a hawthorn branch. There he clung and crept about the branch, his raft in the sunshine, as men chilled at sea cling and creep about their platform of beams in the waste of waves. His feeble force was almost spent.The sun shone and his rays fell on red hawthorn spray, on yellow larch bough, on brown fern, rush tip, and grey grass, on red beech and yellow gorse, on broad buff oaks and orange maple, and on the gleaming pond. Wheresoever there was the least colour the sun’s rays flew like a bee to a flower, and drew from it a beauty as they drew the song from the lark.The wind came from the blue sky with drifting skeins of mist in it like those which curled in summer’s dawn over the waters of the New Sea, the wind came and their blood glowed as they walked. King October reigned, and the wind of his mantle as he drew it about him puffed the leaves from the trees. June is the queen of the months, and October is king. “Busk ye and bowne ye my merry men all:” sharpen your arrows and string your bows; set ye in order and march, march to the woods away.The wind came and rippled their blood into a glow, as it rippled the water. A lissom steely sense strung their sinews; their backs felt like oak-plants, upright, sturdy but not rigid; their frames charged with force. This fierce sense of life is like the glow in the furnace where the draught comes; there’s a light in the eye like the first star through the evening blue.Afar above a flock of rooks soared, winding round and round a geometrical staircase in the air, with outstretched wings like leaves upborne and slowly rotating edge first. The ploughshare was at work under them planing the stubble and filling the breeze with the scent of the earth. Over the ploughshare they soared and danced in joyous measure.Upon the tops of the elms the redwings sat—high-flying thrushes with a speck of blood under each wing—and called “kuck—quck” as they approached. When they came to the mound Bevis went one side of the hedge and Mark the other. Then at a word Pan rushed into the mound like a javelin, splintering the dry hollow “gix” stalks, but a thorn pierced his shaggy coat and drew a “yap” from him.At that the hare waited no longer, but lightly leaped from the mound thirty yards ahead. Bound! Bound! Bevis poised his gun, got the dot on the fleeting ears, and the hare rolled over and was still. So they passed October, sometimes seeing a snipe on a sandy shallow of the brook under a willow as they came round a bend. The wild-fowl began to come to the New Sea, but these were older and wilder, and not easy to shoot.One day as they were out rowing in the Pinta they saw the magic wave, and followed it up, till Mark shot the creature that caused it, and found it to be a large diving bird. Several times Bevis fired at herons as they came over. Towards the evening as they were returning homewards now and then one would pass, and though he knew the height was too much he could not resist firing at such a broad mark as the wide wings offered. The heron, perhaps touched, but unharmed by the pellets whose sting had left them, almost tumbled with fright, but soon recovered his gravity and resumed his course.Somewhat later the governor having business in London took Bevis and Mark with him. They stayed a week at Bevis’s grandpa’s, and while there, for Bevis’s special pleasure, the governor went with them one evening to see a celebrated American sportsman shoot. This pale-face from the land of the Indians quite upset and revolutionised all their ideas of how to handle a gun.The perfection of first-rate English weapons, their accuracy and almost absolute safety, has obtained for them pre-eminence over all other fire-arms. It was in England that the art of shooting was slowly brought to the delicate precision which enables the sportsman to kill right and left in instantaneous succession. But why then did this one thing escape discovery? Why have so many thousands shot season after season without hitting upon it? The governor did not like his philosophy of the gun upset in this way; his cherished traditions overthrown.There the American stood on the stage as calm as a tenor singer, and every time the glass ball was thrown up, smash! a single rifle-bullet broke it. A single bullet, not shot, not a cartridge which opens out and makes a pattern a foot in diameter, but one single bullet. It was shooting flying with a rifle. It was not once, twice, thrice, but tens and hundreds. The man’s accuracy of aim seemed inexhaustible.Never was there any exhibition so entirely genuine: never anything so bewildering to the gunner bred in the traditionary system of shooting. A thousand rifle-bullets pattering in succession on glass balls jerked in the air would have been past credibility if it had not been witnessed by crowds. The word of a few spectators only would have been disbelieved.“It is quite upside down, this,” said the governor. “Really one would think the glass balls burst of themselves.”“He could shoot partridges flying with his rifle,” said Mark.Bevis said nothing but sat absorbed in the exhibition till the last shot was fired and they rose from their seats, then he said, “I know how he did it!”“Nonsense.”“I’m sure I do: I saw it in a minute.”“Well, how then?”“I’ll tell you when we get home.”“Pooh!”“Wait and see.”Nothing more was said till they reached home, when half scornfully they inquired in what the secret lay?“The secret is in this,” said Bevis, holding out his left arm. “That’s the secret.”“How? I don’t see.”“He puts his left arm out nearly as far as he can reach,” said Bevis, “and holds the gun almost by the muzzle. That’s how he does it. Here, see—like this.”He took up his grandfather’s gun which was a muzzle-loader and had not been shot off these thirty years, and put it to his shoulder, stretching out his left arm and grasping the barrels high up beyond the stock. His long arm reached within a few inches of the muzzle.“There!” he said.“Well, it was like that,” said Mark. “He certainly did hold the gun like that.”“But what is the difference?” said the governor. “I don’t see how it’s done now.”“But I do,” said Bevis. “Just think: if you hold the gun out like this, and put your left arm high up as near the muzzle as you can, you put the muzzle on the mark directly instead of having to move it about to find it. And that’s it, I’m sure. I saw that was how he held it directly, and then I thought it out.”“Let me,” said Mark. He had the gun and tried, aiming quickly at an object on the mantelpiece. “So you can—you put the barrels right on it.”“Give it to me,” said the governor. He tried, twice, thrice, throwing the gun up quickly.“Keep your left hand in one place,” said Bevis. “Not two places—don’t move it.”“I do believe he’s right,” said the governor.“Of course I am,” said Bevis in high triumph. “I’m sure that’s it.”“So am I,” said Mark.“Well, really now I come to try, I think it is,” said the governor.“It’s like a rod on a pivot,” said Bevis. “Don’t you see the left hand is the pivot: if you hold it out as far as you can, then the Long part of the rod is your side of the pivot, and the short little piece is beyond it—then you’ve only got to move that little piece. If you shoot in our old way then the long piece is the other side of the pivot, and of course the least motion makes such a difference. Here, where’s some paper—I can see it, if you can’t.”With his pencil he drew a diagram, being always ready to draw maps and plans of all kinds. He drew it on the back of a card that chanced to lie on the table.“There, that long straight stroke, that’s the line of the gun—it’s three inches long—now, see, put A at the top, and B at the bottom like they do in geometry. Now make a dot C on the line just an inch above B. Now suppose B is where the stock touches your shoulder, and this dot C is where your hand holds the gun in our old way at home. Then, don’t you see, the very least mistake at C, ever so little, increases at A—ratio is the right word, increases in rapid ratio, and by the time the shot gets to the bird it’s half a yard one side.”“I see,” said Mark. “Now do the other.”“Rub out the dot at C,” said Bevis. “I haven’t got any indiarubber, you suppose it’s rubbed out: now put the dot, two inches above B, and only one inch from the top of the gun at A. That’s how he held it with his hand at this dot, say D.”“I think he did,” said the governor.“Now you think,” said Bevis. “It takes quite a sweep, quite a movement to make the top A incline much out of the perpendicular. I mean if the pivot, that’s your hand, is at D a little mistake does not increase anything like so rapidly. So its much more easy to shoot straight quick.”They considered this some while till they got to understand it. All the time Bevis’s mind was working to try and find a better illustration, and at last he snatched up the governor’s walking-stick. The knob or handle he held in his right hand, and that represented the butt of the gun which is pressed against the shoulder. His right hand he rested on the table, keeping it still as the shoulder would be still. Then he took the stick with the thumb and finger of his left hand about one third of the length of the stick up. That was about the place where a gun would be held in the ordinary way.“Now look,” he said, and keeping his right hand firm, he moved his left an inch or so aside. The inch at his hand increased to three or four at the point of the stick. This initial error in the aim would go on increasing till at forty yards the widest spread of shot would miss the mark.“And now this way,” said Bevis. He slipped his left hand up the stick to within seven or eight inches of the point. This represented the new position. A small error here—or lateral motion of the hand—only produced a small divergence. The muzzle, the top of the stick, only varied from the straight line the amount of the actual movement of the left hand. In the former case a slight error of the hand multiplied itself at the muzzle. This convinced them.“How we shall shoot!” said Mark. “We shall beat Jack hollow!”They returned home two days afterwards, and immediately tried the experiment with their double-barrels. It answered perfectly. As Bevis said, the secret was in the left arm.When about to shoot grasp the gun at once with the left hand as high up the barrel as possible without inconveniently straining the muscles, and so bring it to the shoulder. Push the muzzle up against the mark, as if the muzzle were going to actually touch it. The left hand aims, positively putting the muzzle on the game. All is centred in the left hand. The left hand must at once with the very first movement take hold high up, and must not be slid there, it must take hold high up as near the muzzle as possible without straining. The left hand is thrust out, and as it were put on the game. Educate the left arm; teach it to correspond instantaneously with the direction of the glance; teach it to be absolutely stable for the three necessary seconds; let the mind act through the left wrist. The left hand aims.This is with the double-barrel shot gun; with the rifle at short sporting ranges the only modification is that as there is but one pellet instead of two hundred, the sight must be used and the dot put on the mark, while with the shot gun in time you scarcely use the sight at all. With the rifle the sight must never be forgotten. The left hand puts the sight on the mark, and the quicker the trigger is pressed the better, exactly reversing tradition. A slow deliberative rifleman was always considered the most successful, but with the new system the fire cannot be delivered too quickly, the very instant the sight is on the mark, thus converting the rifleman into a snap-shooter. Of course it is always understood that this applies to short sporting ranges, the method is for sporting only, and does not apply to long range.One caution is necessary in shooting like this with the double-barrel. Be certain that you use a first-class weapon, quite safe. The left hand being nearly at the top of the barrel, the left hand itself, and the whole length of the left arm are exposed in case of the gun bursting. I feel that some cheap guns are not quite safe. With a good gun by a known maker there is no danger.The American has had many imitators, but no one has reached his degree of excellence in the new art which he invented. Perhaps it is fortunate that it is not every one who can achieve such marvellous dexterity, for such shooting would speedily empty every cover in this country.Big Jack learned the trick from them in a very short time. His strong left arm was as steady as a rock. He tried it with his little rifle, and actually killed a hare, which he started from a furze bush, as it ran with a single bullet. But the governor though convinced would not adopt the new practice. He adhered to the old way, the way he had learned as a boy. What we learn in youth influences us through life.But Bevis and Mark, and Big Jack used it with tremendous effect in snap-shooting in lanes where the game ran or flew across, in ferreting when the rabbits bolted from hole to hole, in snipe shooting, in hedge-hunting, one each side—the best of all sport, for you do not know what may turn out next, a hare, a rabbit, a partridge from the dry ditch, or a woodcock from the dead leaves.

Meantime they taught Big Jack to swim. He came down to look at the cave on New Formosa, and Frances so taunted and tormented him because the boys could swim and he could not, that at last the giant, as it were, heaved himself up for the effort, and rode down every morning. Bevis and Mark gave him lessons, and in a fortnight he could swim four or five strokes to the railings. Directly he had the stroke he got on rapidly, for those vast lungs of his, formed by the air of the hills, floated him as buoyantly as a balloon. So soon as ever he could swim, Frances turned round and tormented him because the boys had taught him and not he the boys.

Bevis and Mark could not break off the habit of bathing every morning, and they continued to do so far into October, often walking with bare feet on the hoar-frost on the grass, and breaking the thin ice at the edge of the water by tapping it with their toes. The bath was now only a plunge and out again, but it gave them a pleasant glow all day, and hardened them as the smith hardens iron.

Up at Jack’s they tried again with his little rifle, and applying what they had learnt from the matchlock while shooting with ball, soon found out the rifle’s peculiarities. It only wanted to be understood and coaxed like everything else. Then they could hit anything with it up to sixty yards. Beyond that the bullet, being beaten out of shape when driven home by the ramrod, could not be depended upon. In October they could shoot where they pleased on condition of sparing the pheasants for their governors. There were no preserved covers, but a few pheasants wandered away and came there. October was a beautiful month.

One morning Tom, the ploughboy, and some time bird-keeper, came to the door and asked to see them. “There be a pussy in the mound,” he said, with the sly leer peculiar to those who bring information about game. He “knowed” there was a hare in the mound, and yet he could not have given any positive reason for it. He had not actually seen the hare enter the mound, nor found the run, nor the form, neither had he Pan’s intelligent nostrils, but he “knowed” it all the same.

Rude as he looked he had an instinctive perception—supersensuous perception—that there was a hare on that mound, which twenty people might have passed without the least suspicion. “Go into the kitchen,” said Bevis, and Tom went with a broad smile of content on his features, for he well knew that to be sent into the kitchen was equivalent to a cheque drawn on the cellar and the pantry.

Bevis and Mark took their guns, Pan followed very happily, and they walked beside the hedges down towards the place, which was at some distance. The keenness of the morning air, from which the sun had not yet fully distilled the frost of the night, freshened their eagerness for sport. A cart laden with swedes crossed in front of them, and though the sun shone the load of roots indicated that winter was approaching. They passed an oak growing out in the field.

Under the tree there stood an aged man with one hand against the hoary trunk, and looking up into the tree as well as his bowed back, which had stiffened in its stoop, and his rounded shoulders would let him. His dress was old and sober tinted, his smock frock greyish, his old hat had lost all colour. He was hoary like the lichen-hung oak trunk. From his face the blood had dried away, leaving it a dull brown, the tan of seventy harvest fields burned into the skin, a sapless brown wrinkled face like a withered oak leaf.

Though he looked at them, and Bevis nodded, his eyes gave no sign of recognition; like a dead animal’s, there was no light in them, the glaze was settling. In the evening it might occur to him that he had seen them in the morning. His years pressed heavy on him, very heavy like a huge bundle of sticks; he was lost under his age. All those years “Jumps” had never once been out of sight of the high Down yonder (not far from Jack’s), the landmark of the place. Within sight of that hill he was born, within such radius he had laboured, and therein he was decaying, slowly, very slowly, like an oak branch. James was his real name, corrupted to “Jumps;” as “Jumps” he had been known for two generations, and he would have answered to no other.

One day it happened that “Jumps” searching for dead sticks came along under the sycamore-trees and saw Jack, and Bevis and Mark swimming. He watched them some time with his dull glazing eyes, and a day or two afterwards opened his mouth about it. “Never seed nobody do thuck afore,” he said, repeating it a score of times as his class do, impressing an idea on others by reiteration, as it takes so much iteration to impress it on them. “Never saw any one do that before.”

For seventy harvests he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis’s governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about those waters, not one had learned to swim. Very likely no one had learned since the Norman conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonalty forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer, and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller and not a home-staying man.

Tom, the ploughboy and bird-keeper, with his companions, the other plough-lads and young men, sometimes bathed in summer in the brook far down the meadows, splashing like blackbirds in the shallow water, running to and fro on the sward under the grey-leaved willows with the sunshine on their limbs. I delight to see them, they look Greek; I wish some one would paint them, with the brimming brook, the willows pondering over it, the pointed flags, the sward, and buttercups, the distant flesh-tints in the sunlight under the grey leaves. But this was not swimming. “Never saw any one do that before,” said the man of seventy harvests.

Under the oak he stood as Bevis and Mark passed that October morning. His hand was like wood upon wood, and as he leaned against the oak, his knees were bent one way and his back the other, and thus stiff and crooked and standing with an effort supported by the tree, it seemed as if he had been going as a beast of the field upon all fours and had hoisted himself upright with difficulty. Something in the position, in the hoary tree, and the greyish hue of his dress gave the impression of an arboreal animal.

But against the tree there leaned also a long slender pole, “teeled up” as “Jumps” would have said, and at the end of the pole was a hook. The old man had permission to collect the dead wood, and the use of his crook was to tear down the decaying branches for which he was now looking. A crook is a very simple instrument—the mere branch of a tree will often serve as a crook—but no arboreal animal has ever used a crook. Ah! “Jumps,” poor decaying “Jumps,” with lengthened narrow experience like a long footpath, with glazing eyes, crooked knee, and stiffened back, there was a something in thee for all that, the unseen difference that is all in all, the wondrous mind, the soul.

Up in the sunshine a lark sung fluttering his wings; he arose from the earth, his heart was in the sky. Shall not the soul arise?

Past the oak Bevis and Mark walked beside the hedge upon their way. Frost, and sunshine after had reddened the hawthorn sprays, and already they could see through the upper branches—red with haws—for the grass was strewn with the leaves from the exposed tops of the bushes. On the orange maples there were bunches of rosy-winged keys. There was a gloss on the holly leaf, and catkins at the tips of the leafless birch. As the leaves fell from the horse-chestnut boughs the varnished sheaths of the buds for next year appeared; so there were green buds on the willows, black tips to the ash saplings, green buds on the sycamores. They waited asleep in their sheaths till Orion strode the southern sky and Arcturus rose in the East.

Slender larch boughs were coated with the yellow fluff of the decaying needles. Brown fern, shrivelled rush tip, grey rowen grass at the verge of the ditch showed that frost had wandered thither in the night. By the pond the brown bur-marigolds drooped, withering to seed, their dull disks like lesser sunflowers without the sunflower’s colour. There was a beech which had been orange, but was now red from the topmost branch to the lowest, redder than the squirrels which came to it. Two or three last buttercups flowered in the grass, and on a furze bush there were a few pale yellow blossoms not golden as in spring, but pale.

Thin threads of gossamer gleamed, the light ran along their loops as they were lifted by the breeze, and the sky was blue over the buff oaks. Jays screeched in the oaks looking for acorns, and there came the muffled tinkle of a sheep-bell. A humble-bee buzzed across their path, warmed into aimless life by the sun from his frost-chill of the night—buzzed across and drifted against a hawthorn branch. There he clung and crept about the branch, his raft in the sunshine, as men chilled at sea cling and creep about their platform of beams in the waste of waves. His feeble force was almost spent.

The sun shone and his rays fell on red hawthorn spray, on yellow larch bough, on brown fern, rush tip, and grey grass, on red beech and yellow gorse, on broad buff oaks and orange maple, and on the gleaming pond. Wheresoever there was the least colour the sun’s rays flew like a bee to a flower, and drew from it a beauty as they drew the song from the lark.

The wind came from the blue sky with drifting skeins of mist in it like those which curled in summer’s dawn over the waters of the New Sea, the wind came and their blood glowed as they walked. King October reigned, and the wind of his mantle as he drew it about him puffed the leaves from the trees. June is the queen of the months, and October is king. “Busk ye and bowne ye my merry men all:” sharpen your arrows and string your bows; set ye in order and march, march to the woods away.

The wind came and rippled their blood into a glow, as it rippled the water. A lissom steely sense strung their sinews; their backs felt like oak-plants, upright, sturdy but not rigid; their frames charged with force. This fierce sense of life is like the glow in the furnace where the draught comes; there’s a light in the eye like the first star through the evening blue.

Afar above a flock of rooks soared, winding round and round a geometrical staircase in the air, with outstretched wings like leaves upborne and slowly rotating edge first. The ploughshare was at work under them planing the stubble and filling the breeze with the scent of the earth. Over the ploughshare they soared and danced in joyous measure.

Upon the tops of the elms the redwings sat—high-flying thrushes with a speck of blood under each wing—and called “kuck—quck” as they approached. When they came to the mound Bevis went one side of the hedge and Mark the other. Then at a word Pan rushed into the mound like a javelin, splintering the dry hollow “gix” stalks, but a thorn pierced his shaggy coat and drew a “yap” from him.

At that the hare waited no longer, but lightly leaped from the mound thirty yards ahead. Bound! Bound! Bevis poised his gun, got the dot on the fleeting ears, and the hare rolled over and was still. So they passed October, sometimes seeing a snipe on a sandy shallow of the brook under a willow as they came round a bend. The wild-fowl began to come to the New Sea, but these were older and wilder, and not easy to shoot.

One day as they were out rowing in the Pinta they saw the magic wave, and followed it up, till Mark shot the creature that caused it, and found it to be a large diving bird. Several times Bevis fired at herons as they came over. Towards the evening as they were returning homewards now and then one would pass, and though he knew the height was too much he could not resist firing at such a broad mark as the wide wings offered. The heron, perhaps touched, but unharmed by the pellets whose sting had left them, almost tumbled with fright, but soon recovered his gravity and resumed his course.

Somewhat later the governor having business in London took Bevis and Mark with him. They stayed a week at Bevis’s grandpa’s, and while there, for Bevis’s special pleasure, the governor went with them one evening to see a celebrated American sportsman shoot. This pale-face from the land of the Indians quite upset and revolutionised all their ideas of how to handle a gun.

The perfection of first-rate English weapons, their accuracy and almost absolute safety, has obtained for them pre-eminence over all other fire-arms. It was in England that the art of shooting was slowly brought to the delicate precision which enables the sportsman to kill right and left in instantaneous succession. But why then did this one thing escape discovery? Why have so many thousands shot season after season without hitting upon it? The governor did not like his philosophy of the gun upset in this way; his cherished traditions overthrown.

There the American stood on the stage as calm as a tenor singer, and every time the glass ball was thrown up, smash! a single rifle-bullet broke it. A single bullet, not shot, not a cartridge which opens out and makes a pattern a foot in diameter, but one single bullet. It was shooting flying with a rifle. It was not once, twice, thrice, but tens and hundreds. The man’s accuracy of aim seemed inexhaustible.

Never was there any exhibition so entirely genuine: never anything so bewildering to the gunner bred in the traditionary system of shooting. A thousand rifle-bullets pattering in succession on glass balls jerked in the air would have been past credibility if it had not been witnessed by crowds. The word of a few spectators only would have been disbelieved.

“It is quite upside down, this,” said the governor. “Really one would think the glass balls burst of themselves.”

“He could shoot partridges flying with his rifle,” said Mark.

Bevis said nothing but sat absorbed in the exhibition till the last shot was fired and they rose from their seats, then he said, “I know how he did it!”

“Nonsense.”

“I’m sure I do: I saw it in a minute.”

“Well, how then?”

“I’ll tell you when we get home.”

“Pooh!”

“Wait and see.”

Nothing more was said till they reached home, when half scornfully they inquired in what the secret lay?

“The secret is in this,” said Bevis, holding out his left arm. “That’s the secret.”

“How? I don’t see.”

“He puts his left arm out nearly as far as he can reach,” said Bevis, “and holds the gun almost by the muzzle. That’s how he does it. Here, see—like this.”

He took up his grandfather’s gun which was a muzzle-loader and had not been shot off these thirty years, and put it to his shoulder, stretching out his left arm and grasping the barrels high up beyond the stock. His long arm reached within a few inches of the muzzle.

“There!” he said.

“Well, it was like that,” said Mark. “He certainly did hold the gun like that.”

“But what is the difference?” said the governor. “I don’t see how it’s done now.”

“But I do,” said Bevis. “Just think: if you hold the gun out like this, and put your left arm high up as near the muzzle as you can, you put the muzzle on the mark directly instead of having to move it about to find it. And that’s it, I’m sure. I saw that was how he held it directly, and then I thought it out.”

“Let me,” said Mark. He had the gun and tried, aiming quickly at an object on the mantelpiece. “So you can—you put the barrels right on it.”

“Give it to me,” said the governor. He tried, twice, thrice, throwing the gun up quickly.

“Keep your left hand in one place,” said Bevis. “Not two places—don’t move it.”

“I do believe he’s right,” said the governor.

“Of course I am,” said Bevis in high triumph. “I’m sure that’s it.”

“So am I,” said Mark.

“Well, really now I come to try, I think it is,” said the governor.

“It’s like a rod on a pivot,” said Bevis. “Don’t you see the left hand is the pivot: if you hold it out as far as you can, then the Long part of the rod is your side of the pivot, and the short little piece is beyond it—then you’ve only got to move that little piece. If you shoot in our old way then the long piece is the other side of the pivot, and of course the least motion makes such a difference. Here, where’s some paper—I can see it, if you can’t.”

With his pencil he drew a diagram, being always ready to draw maps and plans of all kinds. He drew it on the back of a card that chanced to lie on the table.

“There, that long straight stroke, that’s the line of the gun—it’s three inches long—now, see, put A at the top, and B at the bottom like they do in geometry. Now make a dot C on the line just an inch above B. Now suppose B is where the stock touches your shoulder, and this dot C is where your hand holds the gun in our old way at home. Then, don’t you see, the very least mistake at C, ever so little, increases at A—ratio is the right word, increases in rapid ratio, and by the time the shot gets to the bird it’s half a yard one side.”

“I see,” said Mark. “Now do the other.”

“Rub out the dot at C,” said Bevis. “I haven’t got any indiarubber, you suppose it’s rubbed out: now put the dot, two inches above B, and only one inch from the top of the gun at A. That’s how he held it with his hand at this dot, say D.”

“I think he did,” said the governor.

“Now you think,” said Bevis. “It takes quite a sweep, quite a movement to make the top A incline much out of the perpendicular. I mean if the pivot, that’s your hand, is at D a little mistake does not increase anything like so rapidly. So its much more easy to shoot straight quick.”

They considered this some while till they got to understand it. All the time Bevis’s mind was working to try and find a better illustration, and at last he snatched up the governor’s walking-stick. The knob or handle he held in his right hand, and that represented the butt of the gun which is pressed against the shoulder. His right hand he rested on the table, keeping it still as the shoulder would be still. Then he took the stick with the thumb and finger of his left hand about one third of the length of the stick up. That was about the place where a gun would be held in the ordinary way.

“Now look,” he said, and keeping his right hand firm, he moved his left an inch or so aside. The inch at his hand increased to three or four at the point of the stick. This initial error in the aim would go on increasing till at forty yards the widest spread of shot would miss the mark.

“And now this way,” said Bevis. He slipped his left hand up the stick to within seven or eight inches of the point. This represented the new position. A small error here—or lateral motion of the hand—only produced a small divergence. The muzzle, the top of the stick, only varied from the straight line the amount of the actual movement of the left hand. In the former case a slight error of the hand multiplied itself at the muzzle. This convinced them.

“How we shall shoot!” said Mark. “We shall beat Jack hollow!”

They returned home two days afterwards, and immediately tried the experiment with their double-barrels. It answered perfectly. As Bevis said, the secret was in the left arm.

When about to shoot grasp the gun at once with the left hand as high up the barrel as possible without inconveniently straining the muscles, and so bring it to the shoulder. Push the muzzle up against the mark, as if the muzzle were going to actually touch it. The left hand aims, positively putting the muzzle on the game. All is centred in the left hand. The left hand must at once with the very first movement take hold high up, and must not be slid there, it must take hold high up as near the muzzle as possible without straining. The left hand is thrust out, and as it were put on the game. Educate the left arm; teach it to correspond instantaneously with the direction of the glance; teach it to be absolutely stable for the three necessary seconds; let the mind act through the left wrist. The left hand aims.

This is with the double-barrel shot gun; with the rifle at short sporting ranges the only modification is that as there is but one pellet instead of two hundred, the sight must be used and the dot put on the mark, while with the shot gun in time you scarcely use the sight at all. With the rifle the sight must never be forgotten. The left hand puts the sight on the mark, and the quicker the trigger is pressed the better, exactly reversing tradition. A slow deliberative rifleman was always considered the most successful, but with the new system the fire cannot be delivered too quickly, the very instant the sight is on the mark, thus converting the rifleman into a snap-shooter. Of course it is always understood that this applies to short sporting ranges, the method is for sporting only, and does not apply to long range.

One caution is necessary in shooting like this with the double-barrel. Be certain that you use a first-class weapon, quite safe. The left hand being nearly at the top of the barrel, the left hand itself, and the whole length of the left arm are exposed in case of the gun bursting. I feel that some cheap guns are not quite safe. With a good gun by a known maker there is no danger.

The American has had many imitators, but no one has reached his degree of excellence in the new art which he invented. Perhaps it is fortunate that it is not every one who can achieve such marvellous dexterity, for such shooting would speedily empty every cover in this country.

Big Jack learned the trick from them in a very short time. His strong left arm was as steady as a rock. He tried it with his little rifle, and actually killed a hare, which he started from a furze bush, as it ran with a single bullet. But the governor though convinced would not adopt the new practice. He adhered to the old way, the way he had learned as a boy. What we learn in youth influences us through life.

But Bevis and Mark, and Big Jack used it with tremendous effect in snap-shooting in lanes where the game ran or flew across, in ferreting when the rabbits bolted from hole to hole, in snipe shooting, in hedge-hunting, one each side—the best of all sport, for you do not know what may turn out next, a hare, a rabbit, a partridge from the dry ditch, or a woodcock from the dead leaves.

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