180 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN. 



inexplicable belief was right, "that the gang con- 

 sisted of Carleton men," and not of the long-sus- 

 pected labourers from Bozeat. Though transporta- 

 tion seems a slight punishment in the eyes of men, 

 when life has been illegally taken, probably death 

 would have been preferred by the miserable culprit ; 

 he ought, however, to have been left for execu- 

 tion, if not because he shot that man, still by way 

 of precaution to others, for the preventio'n of crime is 

 the true object of all criminal legislation. That he 

 was grievously punished in prison, and that he was a 

 melancholy and severe lesson to all other culprits, 

 there can be no doubt, for, before his illness, he 

 used to alarm the gaol at night with his cries of 

 terror. When approached by the aroused gaolers 

 they found him pale as a ghost, his hair on end, and 

 staring wildly round him ; and, in reply to the ques- 

 tion of^ " What ailed him?" he asserted that the mur- 

 dered gamekeeper appeared to him, and, coming 

 close to his ear, cried murder in it, and, sleeping or 

 wakino; in the dark, he was thus for ever visited. 



After I had preserved game for some time at Har- 

 rold, the " exclusive right " to all sport being rented 

 by me, two of the tenants by the large woods set up 

 a claim to kill the rabbits, I warned them that they 

 must not do it, in vain; for I still found the wadding 

 of their guns by the sides of the woods, and heard 

 their guns when I was otherwise engaged. My keeper 

 stood six feet one or two, and I ordered him, if they 

 did not desist when told to do so, to stop it by force, 

 and to take their guns away. As to the son of one 

 of these tenants, my keeper seemed to hesitate whether 

 he coidd take his gun from him, he being a stout, 

 well-built young man, in the prime of life, nearly six 



