Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SMALL GAME. China has long enjoyed the reputation as a field offering to the sportsman the opportunity of making a bag of small game of a vastly varied nature. But this might not have been the situation had that great wave of sportsmen which swamped the prolific shooting centres of Africa and of India done other than but lightly touched these more eastern shores. Happily shooting in China for many years past has been comparatively free from the visits of the wandering foreign sportsman ; but unhappily sport is now seriously threatened by the foe within the gates, for it is impossible to believe that small game can long withstand the organized raids of the countless numbers of those who now go a shooting. There are others far greater, numerically, than the Anglo-Saxon; the Continentals and the Japanese, who can repeat the reputed old dictum, " Here is a fine day, let us go and kill something." Unfortunately this " fine day" of theirs occurs both in season and out of season,and but too frequently in the latter of these periods. And so the regrettable fact is indisputable that the visible game supply grows markedly less and less, and when a few more years shall have rolled by it is conceivable that it may be said of shooting, from which category the migratory birds must, of course, be eliminated, " the glory has departed." China is, and possibly for all time, will be the congenial home of an infinite variety of both flying and ground small game; but the China best known to the foreign resident is limited to those districts which are within the compass of the treaty ports. Pheasants :—In writing of the small game of China one's thoughts naturally and instinctively turn to the family which is at once the most numerous and most prolific, the Phasiandae. Accor...