Some of his unique birds he had shot himself, having in his youth made expeditions to foreign countries solely with this object, but the great majority he had been compelled to purchase.  In his library were row upon row of books carefully arranged and bearing on this fascinating subject; and his collection of rare, almost extinct, birds’ eggs was one of the finest in the “three kingdoms.”  One egg especially he would point to with pride as the last obtainable of that particular breed.  “This was procured,” he would say, “by my dear old gillie Angus out of the bird’s very nest.  There was just the single egg.  The species,” he added, tenderly handling the delicate, porcelain-like oval in his brown hand covered with very fine, blackish hairs, “is now extinct.”  He was, in fact, a true bird-lover, strongly condemning cockneys, or rough, ignorant persons who, with no collections of their own, wantonly destroyed kingfishers, or scarce birds of any sort, out of pure stupidity.  “I would have them flogged,” he would say, for he believed that no such bird should be killed except on commission, and for choice—­barring such extreme cases as that Dartford Warbler—­in some foreign country or remoter part of the British Isles.  It was indeed illustrative of Mr. Pendyce’s character and whole point of view that whenever a rare, winged stranger appeared on his own estate it was talked of as an event, and preserved alive with the greatest care, in the hope that it might breed and be handed down with the property; but if it were personally known to belong to Mr. Fuller or Lord Quarryman, whose estates abutted on Worsted Skeynes, and there was grave and imminent danger of its going back, it was promptly shot and stuffed, that it might not be lost to posterity.  An encounter with another landowner having the same hobby, of whom there were several in his neighbourhood, would upset him for a week, making him strangely morose, and he would at once redouble his efforts to add something rarer than ever to his own collection.

His arrangements for shooting were precisely conceived.  Little slips of paper with the names of the “guns” written thereon were placed in a hat, and one by one drawn out again, and this he always did himself.  Behind the right wing of the house he held a review of the beaters, who filed before him out of the yard, each with a long stick in his hand, and no expression on his face.  Five minutes of directions to the keeper, and then the guns started, carrying their own weapons and a sufficiency of cartridges for the first drive in the old way.

A misty radiance clung over the grass as the sun dried the heavy dew; the thrushes hopped and ran and hid themselves, the rooks cawed peacefully in the old elms.  At an angle the game cart, constructed on Mr. Pendyce’s own pattern, and drawn by a hairy horse in charge of an aged man, made its way slowly to the end of the first beat: 

George lagged behind, his hands deep in his pockets, drinking in the joy of the tranquil day, the soft bird sounds, so clear and friendly, that chorus of wild life.  The scent of the coverts stole to him, and he thought: