GAME AND ITS PROTECTION. 147 



of the community should be overcome, and their 

 efforts to have good laws passed, and to make them 

 effectual, should be sustained. The vulgar idea, 

 that confounds laws for the protection of the wild 

 creatures of wood, meadow, lake, and stream, with 

 the monstrous game-laws of olden time — that made 

 killing a hare more criminal than killing a man — 

 should be corrected. 



In this country, where every man is e.xpected to 

 be a sort of volunteer-policeman, all should unite in 

 enforcing the laws; and then, in spite of the irre- 

 pressible obstinacy of the German enthusiast, and 

 the mean cunning of the sneaking poacher, our 

 cities would soon be rid of the disgusting worms 

 that make their trees hideous, our farms protected 

 from the devastations of the curculio, the weevil, 

 the borer, and the army-worm ; the country would 

 once more be populated with its native feathered 

 game, and our fields would resound with the glad 

 songs of the little birds that there build their 

 homes. 



So long as the ignorant of our nouveaux riches, 

 imagining themselves to be epicures, will pay for 

 unseasonable game an extravagant price, so long 

 will unscrupulous market-men purchase, and loafing, 

 disreputable, tavern-haunting poachers shoot or other- 

 wise kill their prey. It must be made a disgrace, 

 and if necessary punished as a crime, for any modern 

 LucuUus to insult his guests by presenting to them 

 game out of season ; and eating-house keepers should 

 not only be taught — by persistent espionage, if ne- 



