262 CHAMOIS HUNTING. 



have the late revolutionary changes caused such dark 

 and bitter feelings as in those of the foresters and 

 gamekeepers : for not only did they see that which 

 it had been their pride to guard, at once, partly by 

 law and partly in defiance of the laws, given over to 

 plunder, but they found themselves with hardly a 

 shadow of protection, while defending the little which 

 the new order of things had left them. At first indeed 

 it seemed as though matters were arranged to protect 

 the thief, rather than him whose property had been 

 stolen. For the new game-laws were partial; they 

 were carried out too with a miserable inertness ; more- 

 over the authorities were themselves often possessed 

 by the same spirit, subversive of order, or were influ- 

 enced by fear ; so that the poacher, though caught in 

 the fact, had but to bear himself with effrontery and 

 bravely lie, in order to escape scot free. He knew 

 besides that the foresters dared not fire at him ; while 

 he, defying the law, cared little for a similar restric- 

 tion. When one hears of the ill-treatment, and inso- 

 lence, and danger, to which these men were exposed 

 when this lawless spirit broke loose over the land, one 

 only wonders how human patience could have been 

 found so enduring, and that not more human blood 

 was shed. 



For a true sportsman it is a painful thing to see 

 game hunted mercilessly at all times, the dam shot 

 away from her helpless young, and the kid destroyed 

 when it is only a few weeks old. And this was going 

 on the whole year round, in every spot where a deer 



