Now that kind of thing starts you very nicely for the day.  It isn’t necessary that either of the sportsmen whose dialogue has been reported should believe implicitly in the absolute truth of what he is saying.  Observe, neither of them says that he himself met this man.  He merely gets conversation out of him on the strength of what someone else has told him.  That, you see, is the real trick of the thing.  Don’t bind yourself to such a story as being part of your own personal experience.  Work it in on another man’s back.  Of course there are exceptions even to this rule.  But this question I shall be able to treat at greater length when I come to deal with the important subject of “Shooting Anecdotes.”

[Illustration]

Very often you can work up quite a nice little conversation on cigarettes.  Every man believes, as is well-known, that he possesses the only decent cigarettes in the country.  He either—­(1), imports them himself from Cairo, or (2), he gets his tobacco straight from a firm of growers somewhere in Syria and makes it into cigarettes himself; or (3), he thinks Egyptian cigarettes are an abomination, and only smokes Russians or Americans; or (4), he knows a man, BACKASTOPOULO by name, somewhere in the Ratcliffe Highway, who has the very best cigarettes you ever tasted.  You wouldn’t give two-pence a hundred for any others after smoking these, he tells you.  And, lastly, there is the man who loathes cigarettes, despises those who smoke them, and never, smokes anything himself except a special kind of cigar ornamented with a sort of red and gold garter.

Out of this conflict of preferences the young shooter can make capital.  By flattering everybody in turn, he can practically get his smoking gratis, for everyone will be sure to offer him at least one cigarette, in order to prove the superiority of his own particular kind.  And if the young shooter, after smoking it, expresses a proper amount of ecstasy, he is not at all unlikely to have a second offered to him.  Most men are generous with cigarettes.  Many a man I know would far rather give a beggar a cigarette than a shilling, though the cigarette may have cost, originally, a penny-halfpenny, or more—­a strange and paradoxical state of affairs.

Here is a final piece of advice.  Admire all cigarette-cases, and say of each that it’s the very best and prettiest you ever saw.  You can have no notion how much innocent pleasure you will give.

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