former, however, are always recognized as the more precious of the two. To wound a favourite dog, not only inflicts a severe pang upon its owner, but may, perhaps, spoil your day's sport. Whereas, if a man, or, what is more likely, a little boy, gets peppered in his less vital parts, nobody but himself is a pin the worse for the accident-at all events, a human being is taught caution by getting a few shots into his skin, whereas a dog cannot be. Such, ladies, is the brutal style of talk with which your brothers and husbands habitually regale themselves "after lunch."

Rabbit shooting is a most important branch of winter shooting. It is quite sufficient diversion for a whole day, and affords a delightful change after a morning's work among the pheasants. Shooting rabbits in cover as they jump across a narrow ride, or dart between the thick bushes, requires, of course, much greater dexterity than shooting them out of a hedgerow. But this latter practice affords admirable sport. To enjoy it thoroughly there should be four guns: two on each side of the hedgeone to take the rabbit as he comes out, the other to wipe his colleague's eye, should that organ have been too much wetted to enable its possessor to see clearly. We have seen more fun over an hour or two's shooting of this kind than over any kind of shooting we are acquainted with. The worst of preserving rabbits in sufficient quantities is that the presence of them on a farm seems to put tenants into a greater rage than any other kind of game. No doubt they do a great deal of damage. But they can't do more than hares. We suspect that farmers regard a large head of rabbits as the mere wantonness of preserving. Hares and pheasants, they would tell you, are worth eating when you get them; but rabbits they call vermin. They can buy them, too, for sixpence apiece, and cheapness, we must suppose, breeds contempt.

Snipe and duck shooting are getting worse and worse every year in England. This falling-off is probably attributable to the extensive drainage which has been carried on all over the kingdom for the last few years, and bids fair to extinguish, within no long period, one of the prettiest of the sportsman's pleasures. There will always, we imagine, be certain districts which are not worth reclaiming, where birds of this species will continue to be found pretty plentifully. But in the cultivated parts of England the complaint is universal, that where, twenty years ago, you could get thirty or forty shots in a morning's walk, you now cannot count on half-a-dozen. The present writer has never seen either snipe or wild-fowl shooting in anything like perfection. But he can speak to the cheerful and invigorating character of a walk along the brook-side in the early days of a frost, when the ground is just covered with a thin coating. of snow, and both snipe and duck have come up the running streams which remain as yet unfrozen, away from the ice-bound marshes. In walking a brook-side, the young sportsman should remember always, if he can, to beat down the wind, for snipe always fly against it; and by pursuing that course you are almost sure of getting cross-shots at them, in which position they are very much easier to kill. The best way of

shooting at a snipe is still a moot point among sportsmen. Some say, shoot directly, the moment you catch sight of the white under his wingstraight at that, and don't let him get away. Others recommend waiting till he has finished the gyrations with which he begins his flight, and to take him at thirty or even forty yards. A great deal depends upon every individual's style of shooting. If he is a very quick shot, perhaps the first-mentioned plan is the best. But we should be inclined, on the whole, to back the other in the long run, especially seeing that a very slight wound is sure to bring a snipe to the ground; and that if you shoot steadily after him as he goes away straight, with a large charge of very small shot, it is hard if one or two don't catch him.

But you have just come upon a sharp bend in the stream where the banks are rather steep, and two or three willows or thorn-bushes, hanging very thickly over the surface, hide a nice little pool from observation. What is this sudden splash, as if a cow were waltzing in the water? The quack, quack-quarck, in another quarter of a second, sends a thrill through your whole body. Ducks, by jingo, and well within shot, too! Two mallards and three ducks-now only take your time! Take your time, sir, I implore you. They rise straight up, and hang for a moment ere they go. Then's your chance. Take your first bird as he poises himself almost stationary in mid-air, and the second as he turns to make off. So shall you seldom fail of your double shot, and return covered with glory. How well I recollect my first duck! I was about seventeen, I believe, at the time. Ducks were scarce in our neighbourhood, and I lived very little at home. It was a very hard winter, and I was determined to have blood or perish in the snow. They got up, two of them, out of a large ditch, nearly full of half-frozen water, from under a great hawthorn-bush, on which the berries blushed through the snow like a bride's cheek through her lace. This simile, I confess, I thought of at a subsequent period. I banged rather recklessly at the nearest as soon as my gun was to my shoulder, and down she flopped dead into the water she had just risen from. I jumped in-I know that, nearly up to my middle, to make sure of my prize at once-and never shall I forget the triumph with which I walked home icicled, but still glowing, and banged down my treasure on the kitchen table. Well, we grow older and wiser. I've gone kneedeep into many follies since, but I don't think I should do that again.

Bohemians and Bohemianism.

THE experienced Magazine-reader knows perfectly well, when he sees the title of this paper, that I am not going to entertain him with a discourse on Huss and the Hussites; on Elizabeth the Queen of Hearts (in whose service, by the way, an ancestor of my own trailed a pike); or on the city of Prague, and the great Panslavonic movement. He discerns at a glance that I am going to talk about that section of societyto speak Hibernicè-which lives out of society: the Bohemians, not of Bohemia, but of that world of which, first in French books, and afterwards in English books, we have lately heard so much. It may be as well, however, for the satisfaction of prudent and wary minds, if I begin by showing what my modest ambition in the matter is. There are many blackguards who are Bohemians, but it does not at all follow that every Bohemian is a blackguard. So far from wishing to encourage young fellows of the weaker sort in a Bohemianism of which their families entertain a natural dread, I make no pretension to deal with what they might probably think the most piquant side of the subject. Indeed, the Bohemian who lives out of the world only because he is not fit for it-who dignifies his natural exile from polite life with the name of Bohemianism-is not picturesque, and is not at least not for the most part-the kind of man we are to hear of in this essay. By a Bohemian, for present purposes, is meant a gentleman who, being no worse born, or bred, or educated than other folks, is yet, through some strong peculiarity of temperament in the first instance, acted on by circumstances in the second, alienated from society in its established, conventional, and certainly very convenient sense.

It is a curious thought that such a class of men should exist, and should now be absolutely beginning (in Paris, at all events,) to have a special literature of their own. Curious that there should be men who never enter a drawing-room, or leave a card, or make a formal call, or go to church, or subscribe to anything, or attend funerals, or give anybody away in marriage, or are godfather to anybody's child, or are executors and trustees to anybody, or are consulted about anybody's education, or take the chair at public meetings, or are "generally respected" in any "neighbourhood" known to the grave and busy and polite world at large. It is to their complete alienation from all this that such men owe the appellation which assimilates their class to that of the gipsies. They may have turtle-soup in their kettles at lucky times. They may be better descended than the magistrate who eyes them askance across his park-paling. But gipsies they are in fact and law. When one of them runs off with a blooming heiress, like Johnny Faa in the Scotch ballad, isn't there a shrieking

from ball and bower? When one of them succeeds himself to a good estate, what gloomy prophecies run round the neighbourhood! How impossible it is for the graceless fellow even to look at a fine tree without being suspected of a wish to cut it down! "A Bohemian, sir "-people are beginning to say now, as our ancestors said a prodigal, a scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well, and so forth. The strong centralizing spirit of the age makes the fact that the man is out of the social centre, determine the nickname for him. He is not among us ;-well, he is a gipsy ipso facto. And the outsider takes up with a certain relish, and even pride, the title; and revenges himself on the enemy as occasion offers. The frequent attacks on "respectability," which have marked our light literature for many years back, are so many testimonies to the intellectual vigour of Bohemianism; and the Bohemian of the student class has repeatedly fought at the barricades in the Continental revolutions of later years.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to identify Bohemianism with any system of opinions, or any condition of life. Charles the Second cared not a straw more for popular freedom than Louis the Fourteenth; and Louis the Fourteenth was not a whit more moral than Charles the Second. But Charles was an arrant Bohemian; while Louis absolutely enjoyed the routine, and conventionalism, and etiquette of life, and maintained the stiffest external decorum, whatever his private amusements might be. Again, Fielding was an almost typical Bohemian. There is a passage in his cousin Lady Mary's Letters, about his perfect happiness so long as the means of immediate enjoyment were before him, which might serve for a description of the Bohemian ethos. But so was that excellent and moral champion of Church and State, Dr. Johnson. His preference for tavern life-the difficulty of getting him into a clean shirt and out to a regular dinner-party-his careless habits at private houses, which so distressed Mrs. Boswell-were all Bohemian to the core. The quiet Lamb was as essentially Bohemian as the violent Porson. And if we turn from history to fiction, we shall find that the class includes Tom Pinch as well as Fred. Bayham. In short, Bohemianism is a form of character, rather than a school of opinion or a creation of circumstances. I have lost two friends of the persuasion during the last twelvemonth. One left a hundred and fifty thousand pounds: the other regarded all families as upstart that had risen since the Reformation, which he looked upon as a plebeian and overrated movement. So that a Bohemian must not necessarily be supposed to be an adventurer, or a revolutionist, or a toper even; though it may readily be conceded that the Bohemian view of life tends to develop characters of a genial and glowing eccentricity, to whom tea is dear rather as the restoring stimulant of the morning, than as the mild inspirer of the wisdom and morality of a staid assemblage at the close of the day.

The worst of these clever and pleasant fellows is (and the cleverer and stranger they are, the harder it often goes with them,) that they

have a way of dying off as they draw towards forty.

They may see

people under the table, but people get their revenge by seeing them under the sod. Let me open that photographic album which every man has in his memory, to try and find you some portraits of the wilder Bohemians I have known.

Old Bertie of the Patagonian, a line-of-battle ship that I served in in 184-, was the earliest Bohemian I remember. He was a ten years' mate, a phenomenon quite unknown now-a-days, when the mate has become a sub-lieutenant, and when most men are lieutenants at two or three and twenty. As a youngster, I fell under Bertie's protection, who used my towels and Windsor soap at his toilette; flung a camp-stool at my head when he was crapulous; made me run his messages and listen to his yarns; and was of dubious benefit even in his kindest moments. "Jemmy my boy," he said, when we had beat up to the anchorage in Gibraltar Bay, under double-reefed topsails, "you've never been through the Gut before, and I'll make you drunk! Steward, a bottle of champagne !" Bertie was so inherently Bohemian, that he had rarely through life returned to see his family on being paid off from a commission. The Union at Plymouth, the Quebec at Portsmouth, Hatchett's in Piccadilly knew him well, but he had a vague impatience of the paternal roof, and they rarely knew more of him there, than that he was in the Pacific, or the East Indies, or that somebody had met him at Barbadoes or Bermuda. His father disinherited him in favour of a younger brother, and it was said that Bertie could have disputed the will. But the younger brother knew his man, and ministering to his simple wants by occasional ten-pound notes, secured the undisturbed enjoyment of the estate. And so Bertie jogged on-occasionally staggering a little-through life; was a capital though rather brutal officer; a quarrelsome but honourable messmate; fought several duels with military men, against whose cloth he had the old and now almost entirely extinct nautical prejudice, and died without ever attaining the rank of lieutenant, after some seventeen years service afloat.

This was a man of the old school. The younger Bohemians of the service, of my own standing, were a more polished breedthough none of them could have kept a lower deck in order like Bertie, from whose red nose the men ran as from a glimpse of the nether fires. They were generally, indeed, what used to be called Q.H.B.'sQueen's hard bargains-from a professional point of view; and this I take to be characteristic of most true Bohemians, wherever you find them. They may be soldiers, or sailors, or painters, or authors, as the case may be; but there appears to be a narrowness in professional pursuits which repels them, and if they achieve anything good, it is by native power rather than application. Old Bertie, though he habitually abused the service, knew the work; but the younger men of his kidney, I used to remark, rather thought it the swell thing not to know the work. "What is your opinion, sir," said a pompous old visitor to one of these fellows,