an extra keeper and a dog or two thrown in, is such a serious business that you will find four pairs of horses can barely do the work, and next day they will very likely be unworkable.
Let me give one word of advice as to motoring to your shoot. Always wear spectacles, and have a pair or two for your guests who sit on the front seat with you. The keen air of a frosty morning, or driving, rain at top speed, will not increase the accuracy of your aim, let alone the chance in the early autumn of a gnat in your eye, than which nothing can sometimes be more painful, or, later on in the year, a speck of gravel which may cut you like a knife.
As to wildfowling, you can go to your punt more rapidly in the morning, and an extra ten minutes in bed will be welcomed by anyone who has had experience of early punting. You can also, when the opportunity presents itself, shoot your Golden Plover from the motor-car without any chance of your horse suddenly bolting at the discharge, and wood-pigeons and cock partridges later in the season can be brought down from the road after a little practice with the greatest ease, without rising from your seat. Rabbits and hares at night will run sometimes for a quarter of a mile before your acetylene lamps, and you can pick them off in the same way with your gun; oftentimes with your car you will unintentionally run over panicked rabbits or hares who dash frantically under your wheel. It is always worth while stopping to see whether you have secured your quarry; and although the mode of killing may result in the hare being more fit for soup than for roast, at times you will be lucky, as I have been, and a head that its mother would not know is the only damage done.
For household purposes, if you live at a distance from your country town, you will find a motor car of great use for parcels, for sending away your game, and for bringing your supplies; and let me also mention that your servants, should you care to give them a day's outing in the summer, will enjoy a motor-car drive and a picnic in the woods with a zest which they never knew in th days of the horse-drawn vehicle.
