134 A YEAR OF SPORT AND NATURAL HISTORY. 



more scrupulous or less inclined for adventure, for a series of 

 mild punishments, inadequate as deterrents and ridiculously out 

 of proportion to his wholesale depredations, had made him 

 wondrous bold. His cessation from active work was the result of 

 a curious adventure. Bob rarely, if ever, went to work at night 

 armed with anything more formidable than a stout blackthorn, but 

 his reputation for dexterity with that, in a give and take bout at 

 cudgelling, made keepers wary, until at last a notice from him 

 saying that he wanted, and meant to have, some pheasants out of 

 a certain preserve, was enough to ensure the absence of watchers 

 when he called. A hot-tempered, athletic young squire could 

 not brook this tyranny, so in answer to such a notice he met the 

 Poacher one night in a dark lane, where, single-handed, they 

 fought it out, first with tough " ash plants," then with fists. At 

 the tenth round Bob confessed that he had met with more than his 

 match, and so they came to a compact. " Yer, Squoire, that'll 

 do, I tell 'ee. You'm a man, you be, and I don't mayn to taake 

 no more ov your vessants." " Bob, you may come whenever you 

 like, but I'll have nobody else, and you must never go into a 

 cover until I've shot it." That compact was faithfully kept, and 

 thenceforth no keeper did so much as Bob to prevent anybody but 

 himself from poaching on that young squire's preserves. But the 

 old fellow was never quite the same after the thrashing he got 

 then. Pride in his own prowess was gone, and he degenerated 

 I grieve to say it into a mere trapper of foxes. 



At this he never had an equal that I knew of. He would lie 

 out all night and in all weathers on the bleak moor side. 

 He could track the lightest imprint of a fox's pad for hundreds of 

 yards, and tell with unerring certainty in which, among many 



