"I'm heartily sorry and ashamed to hear it. Under a sacred fane, too! I grieve for this. It is a lesson to us all. Yet to kill foxes! Tut, tut! 'Volpone, by blood and rank' a gentleman.' I preserve game myself, yet pay tithe unquestioning to reynard." "'Twas assault and battery, whether or no. An' Squire he took Malherb's part, an' parson was o' my side. An' I said as folks must live, an' Malherb, in his lofty way, sees the force of that, an' flings me half a sovereign. But I let it bide on the ground. You can't batter a man like that on a Sunday morning for money. I'm set against him, and I'll set other folk against him too." "Think better of it. Half a sovereign is a very convenient embodiment of ten shillings. Take this one for showing me my way. 'I would be friends with you and have your love.' It is my rule of life." Cloberry accepted the coin thus offered, declared that Peter was a hero, and presently put him upon his road to Fox Tor. But after Mr. Norcot had trotted out of sight, his guide followed in the same direction. The old man skulked under a wall until darkness had fallen upon the moor; then, walking out boldly into a fine piece of meadow-land upon which Maurice Malherb especially prized himself, he opened his sack and took therefrom a box with a pierced top. Gentle squeaking came from inside this receptacle; and now, opening it, Cloberry released a dozen fat and lively moles. "There, my little velvet-coats!" he said; "go to work an' tear the heart out of him when he sees what you can do. Increase an' multiply, my dears, like the children of Israel; an' presently I'll bring up a dozen more to help 'e!" The moles crawled about uneasily, but presently began to dig and sink into the earth. The fog had lifted, and the lights of Fox Tor Farm now shone across the night. Leaman Cloberry shook his fist at them. "That's a beginning," he growled. "An' I'll bring rats for your byres an' stoats for your hen-roosts. I'll plague you; I'll fret your gizzard! An' I wish that I was Moses, for then I'd fetch along all the plagues of Egypt against 'e an' break your stone heart!" Meanwhile, as the vermin-catcher tramped homeward, and presently so far recovered good temper as to sing his only song, Peter Norcot found a welcome and much sympathy. Malherb now regarded himself as an old Dartmoor man, familiar with every possible freak and manifestation of Nature upon the waste. He explained to Norcot the course proper to be pursued in a fog, and Peter, whose knowledge of the Moor extended from boyhood, listened very gravely, acknowledged his errors, and praised the older man's shrewdness in the matter.