The Rabbit Battue. 233 



shape; and these rollickings were looked forward to as little 

 jubilees by every farmer who could shoot j and I really believe 

 if anyone of them had not been invited to the rabbit battue and 

 the rook shooting at the hall, he would have looked upon it as 

 a personal insult. Anyhow, all the others would have supposed 

 that something was wrong between him and Mr. Johnson. Thus, 

 every tenant-farmer on the estate had a kind of indirect interest 

 in preserving the game, and standing well in with the head-keeper. 



There is no shrewder judge of human nature than a Yorkshire- 

 man -, and one winter which I spent in a little village not far from 

 York, I was much amused at the way in which the village trades- 

 men collected their Christmas bills. About the new year a suc- 

 cession of feasts was held at the sign of the Charles the Twelfth. 

 One evening it was the shoemakers' feast j another night it was 

 the blacksmith's, and so on. Each, in his turn, would invite all his 

 customers in the village to a bread-and-cheese supper and ale ; and 

 it was understood that this was the evening he intended to gather 

 toll. Every one came prepared to pay, and not a single customer was 

 ever absent 5 for, as a jolly old farmer told me, if you did not go 

 the others would think you had not got " the brass j" and if you went 

 you must pay. So, at a very trifling outlay for bread-and-cheese 

 and "yeal," the tradesman collected his debts punctually without 

 any trouble. 



So it was with Mr. Johnson and our farmers. When lunch came 

 on, the past season was sure to be discussed, and it was then a treat 

 to him casually, as it were to allude to " that afternoon in Mr. 

 Jones's turnips; my lord often talked about it afterwards" (I believe 

 just then Mr. Jones considered himself a personal friend of his lord- 

 ship's), or, " My lord said to me, ' We'll shoot over Brown's farm 

 to-morrow 3 we're always sure to find game, and lots of it there.' " 

 No trouble to preserve game if the keeper only identified him- 

 self with the tenants ; and this is no difficult matter after all at 

 least, not if every keeper can " soft sawder" them like Mr. Johnson. 



But there was another class of men with whom it was also his 

 interest to ingratiate himself, and, moreover, without whose assist- 



