SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 



labourer know the keeper's regular hours of feeding 

 in the woods, which leave him free to set and watch a 

 steel trap in the turnips, or stealthily to pull up and 

 remove the bushes in one or two fields he knows of 

 where coveys roost, spots which his very good friends 

 with whom he drinks at the lonely alehouse on the 

 cross roads propose to visit with their nets, in a night 

 or two, when the moon is down, the clouds drive dark 

 and low, and a rising south-westerly breeze, whistling 

 over the stubble and grass, drowns the sound of their 

 footsteps ? 



This little alehouse, the robbers' cave of the 

 locality, can be very easily overlooked with its in- 

 comings and outgoings in the week before the First, 

 from the little spinney on the opposite slope, peeping 

 unobserved through the hazel boughs, the watcher 

 having crept there unseen down the hollow lane 

 behind ; the intended theatre of the poachers' opera- 

 tions may then be arrived at with tolerable certainty, 

 keepers' forces mustered, and a warm reception given 

 the rascals at night, with the triumph of capturing 

 their net and hanging it up as a trophy on the beams 

 of the old keeper's gun-room at the Hall. But 

 how is all this to be carried out and the pre- 

 cious coveys saved if the keeper has to be shifting 

 his pheasant coops for the last time in the sunny 



