AN EXTRAORDINARY OCCURRENCE.

Evening Post, Volume XLIX, Issue 16, 19 January 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

AN EXTRAORDINARY OCCURRENCE.

If a novelist had ventured upon such an incident as is reported from Germany, he would probably have incurred the contemptuous comment of the critics. Prince Hohenlohe and Baron Veitinghoff went out stag shooting. Each sportsman, accompanied by a gamekeeper, took a different direction, working his way through dense undergrowth. Of course, in such circumstances, there was no semblance to what is ordinarily understood as deer stalking. The attendant gamekeeper's .business was to attract deer within shooting distance by the use of a decoy call. As the day wore on,, the sportsmen unwittingly approaphed - one another. Each thought he heard the challenge call of a stag, and each was keenly on the alert. But the thicket hereabouts was more than ordinarily dense, and so the sportsmen crept closer and closer together, each perfectly deceived by the decoy calls. Eventually the patience of Prince Hohenlohe became exhausted/,* and he opened fire, discharging three shots in rapid succession in the direction in which he believed , the stag to be. The Duna Gazette relates the sequel thus: — ,"The first bullet glanced off the cartridge belt of Baron Yeitinghoff, the supposed stag; the second struck his watch and sprang off to a distance ; the third. fell dead from a pocket book well filled, vita papers, and the young Baron, though hit three times, stood unwounded. He was so oonvinoed that_not his fellow hunter but a stag was before him, that he attributed the • three shots to explosions of the cartridges in hurbelt, and so was 1 busy in unfastening the belt and throwing it away.- .The astonishment of both comrades when at laet they'found out what'had'hapf pened must have, been great, and their joy at the happy ending of what might have turned out, a tragedy equally so." "If this narration of the details is absolutely correct, we have on record one of the most remarkable j occurrences in, the annals- of sport, and one that will take a prominent place in future Badmintons. *

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