Trespassers. 



But the semi-Bohemians detested by the keeper 

 do not prowl about the confines of a wood with artistic 

 views ; their objects are extremely prosaic, and 

 though not always precisely injurious, yet they annoy 

 him beyond endurance. He is like a spider in the 

 centre of a vast spreading web, and the instant the 

 most outlying threads — in this case represented by 

 fences — are broken he is all agitation till he has 

 expelled the intruder. Men and boys in the winter 

 come stealing into the wood where the blackthorn 

 thickets are for sloes, which are reputed to be improved 

 by the first frosts, and are used for making sloe gin, 

 &c. Those they gather they sell, of course; and 

 although the pursuit may be perfectly harmless in 

 itself, how is the keeper to be certain that, if 

 opportunity offered, these gentry would not pounce 

 upon a rabbit or anything else? Others come for 

 the dead wood ; and it does on the face of it seem 

 hard to deny an old woman who has worked all her 

 days in the field a bundle of fallen branches rotting 

 under the trees. The accumulations of such dead 

 sticks in some places are astonishing : the soil under 

 the ash-poles must slowly rise from the mass of 

 decaying wood and ultimately become greatly 

 enriched by this natural manure. 



When a hard clay soil is revealed by the opera- 



