TRESPASSERS AND POACHERS 237 
to his sister (evidently to take home), and proceeded 
to suck the partridge egg, when I made known my 
presence. Although that boy denied all that I had 
been watching from a distance of a few feet, even 
to putting his hand behind his back and dropping 
the egg which he had tapped ready to suck, I think 
I prevented him from growing up a regular egg 
thief. On another occasion I traced to a woman 
the disappearance of eleven partridge eggs, which, 
by the way, had been sat upon about ten days. 
The woman confessed that she had eaten them all, 
pleading that she ‘fancied summat ta-asty.’ And I 
should imagine that her desire was gratified—by 
eggs that had been sat upon for ten days. The 
wilful destruction of eggs is a difficult matter to deal 
with ; it is so easy to destroy eggs without causing 
evidence strong enough to prove that they were 
destroyed wilfully. Of course, it is different when 
the offender is caught in the act of killing a sitting 
bird with a stick or a catapult. A woodman, who 
thought there were no foxes about, told me that he 
felt sure a partridge had been knocked off her nest, 
because, he said, there were a lot of feathers about, 
and a lump of coal was lying near. Neither of us 
could imagine who had done this thing. The lump 
of coal pointed to someone living in a cluster of 
cottages, the only ones within half a mile. I proved 
to the woodman that no one had knocked the bird 
off with the lump of coal, for the herbage beneath it 
