One day—it was about a week after Allan Quatermain told me his story of the “Three Lions,” and of the moving death of Jim-Jim—he and I were walking home together on  the termination of a day’s shooting. He owned about two thousand acres of shooting round the place he had bought in Yorkshire, over a hundred of which were wood. It was the second year of his occupation of the estate, and already he had reared a very fair head of pheasants, for he was an all-round sportsman, and as fond of shooting with a shot-gun as with an eight-bore rifle.