"
"Oh, yase, it was bidgeon-shooting," cries the Baron: "and I know no
better sbort. Have you been bidgeon-shooting, my dear Squire? De fon is
gabidal."
"No doubt," says I, "for the shooters, but mighty bad sport for the
PIGEON." And this joke set them all a-laughing ready to die. I didn't
know then what a good joke it WAS, neither; but I gave Master Baron,
that day, a precious good beating, and walked off with no less than
fifteen shillings of his money.
As a sporting man, and a man of fashion, I need not say that I took
in the Flare-up regularly; ay, and wrote one or two trifles in that
celebrated publication (one of my papers, which Tagrag subscribed for
me, Philo-pestitiaeamicus, on the proper sauce for teal and widgeon--and
the other, signed Scru-tatos, on the best means of cultivating the
kidney species of that vegetable--made no small noise at the time, and
got me in the paper a compliment from the editor). I was a constant
reader of the Notices to Correspondents, and, my early education having
been rayther neglected (for I was taken from my studies and set, as is
the custom in our trade, to practise on a sheep's head at the tender
age of nine years, before I was allowed to venture on the humane
countenance,)--I say, being thus curtailed and cut off in my classical
learning, I must confess I managed to pick up a pretty smattering of
genteel information from that treasury of all sorts of knowledge; at
least sufficient to make me a match in learning for all the noblemen
and gentlemen who came to our house.
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