The Poacher. 343 



a couple of brace of birds for him at the Parsonage as I rode by, 

 for it would save him the trouble of riding down to the village 

 himself adding, " I must get home as soon as I can, for we expect 

 ' your gang ' over to-night, and I want to be ready for them." We 

 then parted. I must not trouble the reader with a slight description 

 of our village and our head keeper, and explain what the latter 

 meant when he alluded to "your gang." 



Our village lay in the heart of, perhaps, the very strictest pre- 

 served county in England at that day. It was a pretty little village 

 enough ; the forest came up within a mile of it one side, while a 

 stiff inclosed rich agricultural country stretched for miles and miles 

 around it on the other. The forest land was full of pheasants, 

 hares, and rabbits, while the open country swarmed with partridges. 

 The whole district for miles around belonged to the Duke of B., 

 one of our strictest game preservers -, and his head keeper, Johnson, 

 was the very type of his calling a stout, heavy, muscular, middle- 

 aged man, able-bodied and resolute ; the terror of all the poachers 

 round us, for he looked upon them as the rankest of vermin, and if 

 he could have had his own way, would, I believe, have hung them 

 up on the branches of his "keeper's tree " with as little remorse as 

 polecats or weasels. As I said before, our village was a small 

 one, and I suppose scarcely contained two hundred inhabitants ; but 

 it was a nest of poachers, and Johnson used to reckon that on any 

 night we could turn out a gang of half a score of the most deter- 

 mined poachers in the county men who were well versed in all 

 the minutiae of the trade ; who could snare a hare in an open 

 furrow as well as in a smeuse ; who could silently sweep off covey 

 after covey of birds in a night in the very heart of the manor ; 

 who could clear the home preserves close up to the keeper's lodge 

 without firing a shot j but who would at times muster in a gang, 

 armed with guns, and, laying aside all secrecy, march through the 

 forest and nail the pheasants at perch like so many barn-door fowls. 

 Every one of these poachers was a marked man, and every one in 

 the village well knew how he obtained his livelihood during the 

 winter months ; but they were always civil and respectful enough 



