200 . SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 
labourer know the keeper’s regular hours of feeding 
in the woods, which leave him free to set and watch a 
steel trap in the turnips, or stealthily to pull up and 
remove the bushes in one or two fields he knows of 
where coveys roost, spots which his very good friends 
with whom he drinks at the lonely alehouse on the 
cross roads propose to visit with their nets, in a night 
or two, when the moon is down, the clouds drive dark 
and low, and a rising south-westerly breeze, whistling 
over the stubble and grass, drowns the sound of their 
footsteps ? 
This little alehouse, the robbers’ cave of the 
locality, can be very easily overlooked with its in- 
comings and outgoings in the week before the First, 
from the little spinney on the opposite slope, peeping 
unobserved through the hazel boughs, the watcher 
having crept there unseen down the hollow lane 
behind ; the intended theatre of the poachers’ opera- 
tions may then be arrived at with tolerable certainty, 
keepers’ forces mustered, and a warm reception given 
the rascals at night, with the triumph of capturing 
their net and hanging it up as a trophy on the beams 
of the old keeper’s gun-room at the Hall. But 
how is all this to be carried out and the pre- 
cious coveys saved if the keeper has to be shifting 
his pheasant coops for the last time in the sunny 
