Wishing to make their acquaintance, I went in and sat down among them, and found them a little shy--not to say stand-offish, at first. Rustics are often suspicious of the stranger within their gates; but after paying for beer all round, the frost melted and we were soon deep in talk about the wild life of the place; always a safe and pleasant subject in a village. One rough-looking, brown-faced man, with iron-grey hair, became a sort of spokesman for the company, and replied to most of my questions. "And what about badgers?" I asked. "In such a rough-looking spot with woods and all, it strikes me as just the sort of place where one would find that animal." A long dead silence followed. I caught the eye of the man nearest me and repeated the question, "Are there no badgers here?" His eyes fell, then he exchanged glances with some of the others, all very serious; and at length my man, addressing the person who had acted as spokesman before, said, "Perhaps you'll tell the gentleman if there are any badgers here." At that the rough man looked at me very sharply, and answered stiffly, "Not as I know of." A few weeks later, at a small town in the neighbourhood, I got into conversation with a hotel keeper, an intelligent man, who gave me a good deal of information about the country. He asked me where I was staying, and, on my telling him, said "Ah, I know it well--that village in a hole; and a very nasty hole to get in, too--at any rate it was so, formerly. They are getting a bit civilized now, but I remember the time when a stranger couldn't show himself in the place without being jeered at and insulted. Yes, they were a rough lot down in that hole--the Badgers, they were called, and that's what they are called still." The pity of it was that I didn't know this before I went among them! But it was not remembered against me that I had wounded their susceptibilities; they soon found that I was nothing but a harmless field naturalist, and I had friendly relations with many of them.