If a policeman is on duty during the early days of partridge shooting, he will manage to fall in with shooting parties; then he makes it known that he heard shots, and was impelled to take a look round, "to see that there weren't nothing wrong." The policeman's favourite time for making known his presence is soon after the bagging of a good, broad-backed hare. Even policemen become spoiled with favours. On a sportsman telling his keeper to give a hare to a polite and zealous officer of the law, "Excuse me, sir," said he, "but the party over the hedge have just given me a hare, so might I have a brace of birds? Thank ye kindly, I'm sure; a hare will do nicely next time, sir." The sporting policeman can do much to help the luckless sportsman. * * * * * The Woodcraft of Gipsies Gipsies and gamekeepers have enough in common to make them deadly foes. They share an intimate knowledge of the ways of wild creatures. They are skilled trackers and crafty trappers. They are hedgerow men; born to the hedgerow, trained to know the meaning of every hole, and hollow, and run. Their eyes read the story of the hedge as the scholar's the printed page; hedge-lore is their second nature, and it is as though an instinct tells them where the partridge has built, where the hedgehog has buried himself, or where the rabbits are crouching. In their knowledge of the ways of rabbits and hares keepers and gipsies stand alone; and it often happens that all the knowledge and craft of the one class is pitted against the cunning and knowledge of the other. Between keepers and gipsies it is always war. The keeper detests nothing more than a gipsies' camp. His eyes take no more pleasure in their red rags spread on the bushes than might the eyes of a bull. A gipsy camp means to the keeper so much dirt, so much thieving, so many lies, so much the more trouble, and so many the fewer rabbits in his preserves. The gipsies' cauldron, steaming at dusk over a fragrant fire of wood, brings only the bitter knowledge that some of the birds or beasts he is paid to preserve are stewing in the pot. Speak to him of gipsies, and scorn flashes in his eyes, anger flushes on his face. "They be always a-shirking about wi' a dog or two, perkin' into everything," an old keeper once said to us. "They can't let nothing bide."