362 The Poacher. 



never need be afraid of heading your fox or riding over the 

 hounds. 



Times have doubtless much altered since my day, and probably 

 now poaching is not carried on to the extent which it used to be 

 then ; but I have not the least exaggerated, in the previous de- 

 scription, how it used to be with us some five-and- twenty years 

 ago. I could not help remarking in Australia that nine-tenths of 

 the old convicts, according to their own confession, had been sent 

 out for breaches of the game laws ; and, if such was the case, it 

 does indeed seem as if there was some peculiar charm in the 

 poacher's life. I am not one of those, however, who defend the 

 poacher, as many do, on this plea ; and it would be just as absurd 

 to argue that game in a preserved state is ferae naturae, and as 

 much one man's property as another. I have heard many use this 

 argument, but I fancy now we see things in a different light, and I 

 consider the man who walks into a preserve at night to shoot a 

 pheasant is as much guilty of a robbery as the man who breaks 

 into a hen-house to steal poultry, or into a sheep-fold to steal a 

 sheep. 



Moreover, that man must possess a good share of hardihood of 

 the wrong sort who can wander about a forest in the dead of the 

 night, very often at the risk of his life, engaged in a pursuit which 

 he knows to be unlawful ; and depend upon it such a man has 

 gone through the worst of the training to render him fit for any 

 other deed of rapine or bloodshed. In my younger days, I had 

 good opportunities of studying the habits of real desperate poachers, 

 and I am certain that such men would have just as soon stolen a horse 

 or a sheep as a hare or a pheasant, if the risk had been no greater j 

 and the reason why we seldom suffered any depredations at the 

 hands of our gang was, that they acted upon the same principle as 

 the fox, who is said seldom to molest game or poultry in the im- 

 mediate neighbourhood of his own earth. 



