harm ' his birds.' The boy with his scarecrow,
the shepherd with his dog, and the little lass
with her kitten, are alike the objects of his
hatred and tyranny. He has been known to
wrench a gun from the hand of a farmer's son
for shooting a rat; to tell a farmer himself that
he should prefer his not firing at the sparrows in
the corn, as it was ' such a trouble to be always
coming to see what he was after;' to inform
against a farmer for picking up a hare his horse
had killed in her form; and against a labourer
who had taken the dead pheasant out of the
snare which he (the keeper), to secure a conviction
and confirm his suspicions, had first put
there."

Besides these protective duties, the keeper
destroys all the birds and animals which feed
on and keep down the vermin of the farm.
The " windhover" or kestrel, and the barn owl,
two birds which prey on mice and beetles exclusively;
the  weasel, as well as the fox; are pursued
by him with relentless activity. The consequence
is, that, wherever game is strictly preserved,
rats, mice, and beetles, swarm like an
Egyptian plague, and foxes are not to be
found.

Agricultural improvements come within the
range of objects offensive to the view of the
battue-preserver. Some years ago, a ukase
was issued on certain great estates, against the
use of the turnip drill, because partridges were
apt to run along the straight lines under the
broad green leaves of that invaluable plant,
instead of rising on the wing. But the weight
of the rent- paying interest, which is fortunately
dependent in all partridge counties on the root
crop, defeated, after a brief contest, this attempt
to stop the way of agricultural progress. Since
that time, however, the use of artificial manures,
of reaping machines (as cutting the stubble too
close), and the wholesome practice of trimming
banks and cutting hedges, have successively, and
in the last instance too often successfully, been
prohibited by zealous arid ignorant game
preserving landlords.

Where time is an object, where two or three
years are too long for the preparations of an
impatient battue maniac, then breeding and
vermin killing do not suffice, and resort is had
to the illegal purchase of eggs and of birds.
Tomkins Trotman, thatcher by profession and
poacher by taste, is haled off to prison for
being caught with a dozen pheasant's eggs in
his Jim Crow hat, by the sentence of a magistrate
who has through his head gamekeeper
bought or sold a couple of thousand eggs that
very same season. So large is this illegal
traffic, that one of the London game dealers,
by whose intermediation such transactions are
usually concluded, offered last year, in answer
to an application from the executors of
a great game preserving landlord, to take
one hundred thousand pheasant's eggs, as fast
as they could be delivered; and he bought
five hundred live pheasants every week for
several weeks, from a well-known earl and battue-
giver.

The Earl of Washington and Slashington, or
Squire Southacre, or the Reverend Mr. Vulpecide,
or David Deadun, Esq. attorney and bill
discounter, and in virtue of the profits of these
professions renter of a mansion with demesnes
and the right of shooting over some ten thousand
acres- although not the owner of a single
acre- having completed, early in the year,
arrangements for holding one, two, or at most three,
battues between October and Christmas, and
having enabled from a dozen to a score of guns
to fill a two-horse waggon on each eventful day—
and having, also, concluded an arrangement with a
London tradesman for the sale of the produce of
each day's butchery-- will probably not be seen
or heard of in the district any more until next
year: except through his dogs in office, the
gamekeepers, or his viceroys, the law agents
who collect the rents.

The consequences of this abuse of sport—
this mixture of the game slaughterer's and the
game seller's callings—are to be found in crops
ill cultivated, because devoured and destroyed
before harvest; in discontented farmers and
demoralised labourers; in gaols supplied with
artificial criminals; in poor-houses tenanted
by the wives and children of the imprisoned
poachers; in London shops loaded with tame-fed
game, wheat-ricks swarming with rats,
hedgerows ruined by rabbits, hares taking
the place and the food of sheep, and
pheasants as wild as Cochin Chinas and a good deal
fatter.

Of course the vast cost produces very
imposing statistics of the " sport" (?) of the battue
manufacturer. The following is an extract from
the game book of a nobleman, which last year
went the round of the local papers, with some
complimentary remarks on the excellent sport
which the distinguished peer had shown his
friends: " 1st day, 178 hares; 2nd day, 292;
3rd day, 60; 4th day, 195; 5th day, 77; in all,
802 hares in five days, besides countless
pheasants and rabbits."

A competent authority, Mr. Grey, of Dilston,
the agent of the Greenwich Hospital
estates in the north, says: "Look at the
progress of a single hare in a wheat field; you see
him pick a stem here and a stem there, in his
course over the field; he will nibble an inch or
two from this stem, and he does not stop until
he has cut off a great many. It is not the inch
he has eaten, but what would have been a wheat-ear,
which is thus destroyed." Hares are great
travellers. Imagine the damage that eight
hundred hares can do in a single night. We have
ourselves ridden, in the dusk of the evening,
through a forty-acre field on the farm of a
non-resident landlord in Lincolnshire, which was
eventually abandoned by the tenant in
consequence of the hare nuisance and have
disturbed hundreds of hares, as thick as rabbits in
a warren, all eating, and trampling in their play
more than they ate.

Rabbits, when strictly preserved, are perhaps
even more mischievous than hares. Although,
they do not travel so far, they multiply more