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MOTORS AND MOTOR-DRIVING

able to run all the year round, and whether it is smothered in mud, or almost obliterated by snow, to be of practical use you should not spare the car in the winter-time You will find out more weak points and need for alterations in one day in December than in a dozen days in June. Have, say, a six or a twelve-horse-power car for the loaders, a good roomy wagonette with a low gear and plenty of floor space, let them start a quarter of an hour earlier than you, and follow them in your flyer, on a twelve- or twenty-horse-power machine with your guests. Many a last beat of a good shoot has been spoilt because one of the party was not called in time, or was eating his breakfast when the party ought to have been starting. You can now allow a wider margin. The beats which, if you left home at ten, were finished with difficulty, can by the aid of a car be so accelerated that at the end of the day you will probably have a quarter of an hour in hand.

And there are other forms of shooting which can now be enjoyed and which formerly were impossible. I will suppose that your shoot has many natural advantages, and that there are duck pits and snipe marshes at certain places on the property. With two good motor-cars such as I have described you can take four or five guns and loaders; you can visit all of these places in the day, and make a total of wildfowl and snipe which the Game Book will tell constitutes a record. I have myself worked on this system for three or four years past with great success, and a hundred wildfowl a day shot out of small lakes and pools, added to a few snipe and 'oddments,' will make your day one to which you need not disdain to ask your best shots and your cheeriest friends. Twenty to five-and-twenty miles like this can easily be covered by your motor, and you will hardly realise the distance you have been over by the time you return home. To ask any pair of horses, or even a four-in-hand brake, to cover the same mileage, with the roads bad as they generally are in the winter, muddy and soft, with, probably, five guns in the one brake and five loaders in the other, and perhaps