“They used to try and get me to fight the keeper when they did catch me with a wire, but I knowed as hitting is transporting, and just put my hands in my pockets and let ’em do as they liked. _They_ knows I bean’t afraid of ’em in the road; I’ve threshed more than one of ’em, but I ain’t going to jump into _that_ trap. I’ve been before the bench, at one place and t’other, heaps of times, and paid the fine for trespass. Last time the chairman said to I, ‘So you be here again, Oby; we hear a good deal about you.’ I says, ‘Yes, my lard, I be here agen, but people never don’t hear nothing about _you_.’ That shut the old duffer up. Nobody never heard nothing of he, except at rent-audit. “However, they all knows me now—my lard and the steward, and the keeper and the bailies, and the farmers; and they don’t take half the notice of I as they used to. The keeper he don’t dare, nor the policeman as I telled you, and the rest be got used to me and my ways. And I does very well one week with t’other. One week I don’t take nothing, and the next I haves a good haul, chiefly hares and rabbits; ’cause of course I never goes into the wood, nor the plantations. It wants eight or ten with crape masks on for that job. “I sets up about four wires, sometimes only two; if you haves so many it is a job to look after ’em. I stops the hare’s other runs, so that she is sure to come along mine where I’ve got the turnpike up: the trick is to rub your hand along the runs as you want to stop, or spit on ’em, or summat like that; for a hare won’t pass nothing of that sort. So pussy goes back and comes by the run as I’ve chose: if she comes quick she don’t holler; if she comes slow she squeals a bit sometimes before the wire hangs her. Very often I bean’t fur off and stops the squealing. That’s why I can’t use a gin—it makes ’em holler so. I ferrets a goodish few rabbits on bright nights in winter. “As for the pheasants, I gets them mostly about acorn-time; they comes out of the plantations then. I keeps clear of the plantations, because, besides the men a-watching, they have got dogs chained up, and alarm-guns as goes off if you steps on the spring; and some have got a string stretched along as you be pretty sure to kick against, and then, bang! and all the dogs sets up a yowling. Of course it’s only powder, but it brings the keepers along. But when the acorns and the berries be ripe, the pheasants comes out along the hedges after ’em, and gets up at the haws and such like. They wanders for miles, and as they don’t care to go all the way back to roost they bides in the little copses as I told you of. They come to the same copses every year, which is curious, as most of them as will come this year will be shot before next.