“Early Scotch woodcock, I suppose,” says I, sportively alluding to the proverb.

“Scotch woodcock be blowed,” says the Captain, who, it must be confessed, does not include an appreciation of delicate humour amongst his numerous merits; “Scotch, real Scotch, a noggin of it, my boy, with soda in a long glass; glug, glug, down it goes, hissin’ over the hot coppers.  You know the trick, my son, it’s no use pretendin’ you don’t”—­and thereupon the high-spirited warrior dug me good-humouredly in the ribs, and winked at me with an eye which, if the truth must be told, was bloodshot to the very verge of ferocity.

“Talkin’ of woodcock,” he continued—­we were now walking along Pall Mall together—­“they tell me you’re writin’ some gas or other about shootin’.  Well, if you want a tip from me, just you let into the smokin’ room shots a bit; you know the sort I mean, fellows who are reg’lar devils at killin’ birds when they haven’t got a gun in their hands.  Why, there’s that little son of a corn-crake, FLICKERS—­when once he gets talkin’ in a smokin’ room nothing can hold him.  He’d talk the hind leg off a donkey.  I know he jolly nearly laid me out the last time I met him with all his talk—­No, you don’t,” continued the Captain, imagining, perhaps, that I was going to rally him on his implied connection of himself with the three-legged animal he had mentioned, “no you don’t—­it wouldn’t be funny; and besides, I’m not donkey enough to stand much of that ass FLICKERS.  So just you pitch into him, and the rest of ’em, my bonny boy, next time you put pen to paper.”  At this moment my cheerful friend observed a hansom that took his fancy.  “Gad!” he said, “I never can resist one of those india-rubber tires.  Ta, ta, old cock—­keep your pecker up.  Never forget your goloshes when it rains, and always wear flannel next your skin,” and, with that, he sprang into his hansom, ordered the cabman to drive him round the town as long as a florin would last, and was gone.

Had the Captain only stayed with me a little longer, I should have thanked him for his hint, which set me thinking.  I know FLICKERS well.  Many a time have I heard that notorious romancer holding forth on his achievements in sport, and love, and society.  I have caught him tripping, convicted him of imagination on a score of occasions; dozens of his acquaintances must have found him out over and over again; but the fellow sails on, unconscious of a reverse, with a sort of smiling persistence, down the stream of modified untruthfulness, of which nobody ought to know better than FLICKERS the rapids, and shallows, and rocks on which the mariner’s bark is apt to go to wreck.  What is there in the pursuit of sport, I ask myself, that brings on this strange tendency to exaggeration?  How few escape it.  The excellent, the prosaic DUBSON, that broad-shouldered, whiskered, and eminently snub-nosed Nimrod, he too, gives way occasionally.  FLICKERS’S, I own, is an extreme case.  He has indulged himself in