COVERT-SHOOTING. 149 



forty similar characters, sallies forth at night with long 

 nets and scours the country round, breaking fences, 

 leaving gates open, harassing the farmer in many ways, 

 and when game fails, helping himself to poultry or , 

 anything else that is not his. He is as a rule a 

 wretched coward, and the whole gang will run if met 

 by anything like half its number ; but if, with a 

 sufficient number of his gallant associates, he meets 

 an unhappy keeper alone, he will half-murder him ; 

 and he has the consoling reflection that if he wholly 

 does so, he has sympathisers in high places, and 

 will probably escape the extreme penalty of the law, 

 because his victim is only a gamekeeper, whereas if 

 the gamekeeper kills him he is sure to be hanged. 

 These large gangs only exist through the non- 

 enforcement of the law, arising out of the above- 

 mentioned sympathy with the poacher. They can be 

 and are suppressed wherever the Night- Poaching Act 

 is rigidly enforced. For this reason chiefly in Liverpool 

 there is not, I believe, a single poacher. The 

 authorities order the police to stop his spoils coming 



