70 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PARTRIDGE 
of the population acquiesce willingly enough in the 
preservation of partridges and other feathered game ; 
although, if the truth were known, we suspect that 
‘Donald’ often finds the temptation to appropriate 
to his own use the covey of partridges that have 
been reared upon his croft too strong for human 
nature to resist successfully. Latterly, a certain sec- 
tion of the pious agitators who have done so much 
to demoralise the minds of the lower-class Scotch 
have hit upon the ingenious expedient of claiming 
that all feathered game belongs to the small tenants 
of the soil. But, after all, the fault of breaking the 
tenth commandment lies at the door of some of our 
most eminent statesmen, and poaching partridges is, 
in truth, a venial sin compared with the robbing of 
churches or defrauding owners of property of the 
legitimate returns of their capital. 
We have seldom found the poacher to be a man 
of much mental cultivation. You would fancy that 
he possessed a perfect wealth of woodland law, but 
erroneously. Individual poachers, like our Essex 
friend, do acquire a marvellously correct knowledge 
of the habits of all woodland creatures, whether they 
carry fur or feather, and can interpret to you the 
cries of every animal to be found within their 
favourite haunts. But the typical poacher is a 
