136 EXTRACTS FROM NOTE-BOOKS. CH. XXVIII. 



a trade ; they are almost always led to it by a 

 natural lawlessness of disposition and a disin- 

 clination to labour, or else by a wish to earn the 

 means of indulging in drinking and low profligacy, 

 in the same manner as the young Levi or Moses 

 who picks your pocket spends the proceeds of his 

 booty in some den of infamy in town. I allude, of 

 course, in all I have said, not to the illegal follower 

 of game who is led to do wrong by sportsman-like 

 feelings, but to the desperate and systematic poacher 

 who acts from mere love of gain and an utter con- 

 tempt of right and law, and who too frequently 

 would as soon maltreat or kill a gamekeeper who 

 performs his honest duty, as he would shoot a hare. 

 The savage encounters that occasionally occur are 

 invariably commenced by the most lawless and 

 dissolute class of poachers, whose sole object is 

 plunder, and who have not a particle of that love 

 of sport in their composition which so frequently 

 leads the comparatively blameless trespasser into 

 the hands of the law. 



I have entered perhaps too far into a worn-out 

 and unpleasant subject, but I have been led to do 

 so by the honest conviction that, in property of this 

 sort at least, every man has a right to " do what he 

 likes with his own," provided his neighbour does 

 not suffer thereby. 



