356 THE DRY-FLY MAN'S HANDBOOK 



manslaughter as a remedy for their depredations. 

 The sportsman who, in a sort of joke, has declared 

 that every one of his fellow-sportsmen is at heart 

 a bit of a poacher, is responsible in some degree for 

 the glamour with which the village poacher is sur- 

 rounded in the village inn. Let us for once " call 

 a spade a spade " ! The ordinary village poacher is 

 an idle, dissolute vagabond, who will not work, does 

 not dare to commit larceny, and is, above all, desirous 

 of passing his life in a moderate degree of comfort at 

 somebody else's expense. 



He poaches fish in preference to game, because 

 while magistrates, unless deterred by a wholesome 

 fear of being pilloried in " Truth," pass severe 

 sentences on game-poachers they generally err on 

 the side of leniency in cases of fish-poaching. If 

 only the soi-disant respectable tradesman who is will- 

 ing to purchase, at a price considerably below their 

 market value, trout or other fish which have obviously 

 been obtained by unfair means could be successfully 

 prosecuted as a receiver, much of this class of poach- 

 ing would be effectually stopped. 



The law on the subject is in some respects most 

 unjust. The man who takes a trout off a fishmonger's 

 slab can be prosecuted and imprisoned for theft, while 

 the one who wires or nets similar fish from a chalk- 

 stream shallow is not technically a thief, because the 

 trout in the river are by a legal fiction styled ferce 

 naturcB, and are nobody's property. The only pre- 

 ventive is a good keeper, and he is often discouraged 



