82 REMINISCENCES OF A HUNTSMAN 



readiness, and seeing the raven under his trees, he stalked him 

 by the aid of a hedge. Bang went the fruit-avenging gun, and 

 the raven, having felt a shot or two rattle on his feathers, began 

 to hop and flap along the gi-ound as fast as he could. Up ran 

 the parson, thinking to secuie an offender, to be impaled as a 

 future scarecrow, when just as he was about to grasp the raven, 

 the bird opened his mouth to bite, and cried, " D — n your blood !" 

 So startled was the divine, that he threw dowTi his gun, and ran 

 away. 



With traps, gun, and raven, an enormous amount of vermin 

 soon came to hand. The largest bag in one day of old and 

 young jays, when they had left the nest, was thirty-two, and at 

 the end of the year my list of all sorts gave me five hundred 

 head. When I killed a winged vermin, I brought home his head 

 or legs to nail up, and cast the body into the woods, and in a 

 very short time the foxes as regularly picked them up. This 

 was proved by the bird being gone, and then by the wings I 

 found with the cubs. There wei-e a pair of wary old buzzards 

 that had, I suspect, lost toes in my traps, for I could not get 

 them to take a bait, but still hoped to effect it by leaving baits 

 about without a trap. I had put a dead squirrel on a little 

 hillock in a field between the Harrold woods, and when I re- 

 turned to look at it the next day it was gone. " Now for a 

 trap," I thought to myself, as I closely inspected the site where 

 the bait had lain ; but, within a foot of the spot where I had left 

 the squirrel, there lay a young pheasant only a few days out of 

 the shell, which, by the mark of a pad in a mole-hill, a fox had 

 dropped when it took up the squirrel. I obtained a shot at one 

 of these buzzards with a cartridge of No. 1 shot, at an immense 

 distance ; and as the bird sat on a bare bough with the breast 

 to me, I thought I must have hit her. This was proved a couple 

 of days after, by my finding the wings in the playground of 

 some cubs. 



All this time the kennel at Harrold proceeded rapidly. Mr. 

 Berhill, with the touch of a conjurei-'s wand, the magic supplied 

 by me, soon converted the barn into a feeding-house, the cow- 



