When depredations are carried on nightly, or game disappears in large quantities, warrants are obtained, and search made for nets. Except for immediate use the poachers seldom keep their nets at home. They are stowed away in church tower, barn, rick, or out-house. Upon one occasion it got abroad that the constables would make a raid upon a certain cottage where a large net was known to be. The dwelling was a disused toll bar on the turnpike, and commanded a long stretch of road. The good woman of the house saw the constables approaching, and made the most of her time. Taking off her gown, she fastened one end of the net, which was long and narrow, to a projecting crook in the wall; then retiring to the further side of the kitchen, she attached the other end of it to the whalebone of her stays, and by turning round and round, wound the net about her capacious person. When the constables arrived she accompanied them into every corner of the cottage, but no net could be found. CHAPTER III. BADGERS AND OTTERS. Hazelhurst was a long line of woodland, on one side skirted by the sea and on the other by a crumbling limestone escarpment. It was woodland, too, with the deep impress of time upon it--a forest primeval. The branches and boles of the oaks were tortured out of all original conception. Save for colour they might have been congealed water or duramen muscles. Down in the hollows there was deep moss, elastic and silent, over all. For centuries the pines had shed their needles undisturbed. These and the pine trunks sent up a sweet savour from the earth--an odour that acted as a tonic to the whole being. There were sun-flashes in the glades, where the jays chattered and the cushats cooed, and where ever and anon a rabbit rustled through. Often over these the kestrel hung and vibrated its shadow on the spot beneath; or the sparrow-hawk with its clean-cut figure stared with the down on his beak on a dead pine bough. In the summer red creatures that were bits of light gracefully glided among green tassels, and the chatter of squirrels was heard. The older trees attracted woodpeckers, and the nuthatch threw out fine fibres of rotten wood. Sometimes a pheasant or a partridge would startle, getting up from its olive eggs by a log left by the charcoal-burners. Thus rudely disturbed, it had no time to scatter leaves over its nest, as is its wont. The shaggy and corrugated bark of the old trees is larvæ-haunted, and consequently mouse-like creepers abound. These little creatures on every trunk showed conspicuously as they ran their marvellous adaptation to an end, and fulfilled it perfectly. All the wood-birds were there--the White-throat, the Wood and the Willow Wren, the Chiffchaff, and Garden-warbler. These sang from the leafy boughs. But higher up, towards the escarpment, the floor of the wood was rugged and rock-strewn. Boulders had rolled from above, and among these dwelt weasels and ermines. There were at least a pair of martins, and foxes