At present you don't quite understand the ways of the birds, that's all; also those guns are strange to you.
Have a glass of cherry brandy; it will steady your nerves." I drank the cherry brandy, and presently off we went.

The covert we were going to shoot, into which we had been driving pheasants all the morning, must have been nearly a mile long.

At the top end it was broad, narrowing at the bottom to a width of about two hundred yards.

Here it ran into a horse-shoe shaped piece of water that was about fifty yards in breadth.

Four of the guns were placed round the bow of this water, but on its farther side, in such a position that the pheasants should stream over them to yet another covert behind at the top of a slope, Van Koop and I, however, were ordered to take our places, he to the right and I to the left, about seventy yards up the tongue in little glades in the woodland, having the lake to our right and our left respectively.
I noticed with dismay that we were so set that the guns below us on its farther side could note all that we did or did not do; also that a little band of watchers, among whom I recognized my friend the gunsmith, were gathered in a place where, without interfering with us, they could see the sport.