Viewed from the serene vantage-ground of the philosophy of life, poaching is mean and ignoble, and demoralizing sport to you or me, and is not worth the powder and shot, while the fines and punishments are out of all proportion to the joys; yet there are not wanting apologists for it in this apologetic century. “Poaching! Man, there’s no sin in catching a rabbit or snaring a hare. They belong to naebody. Bless you! it’s a gentleman’s trick, shooting.” This is the opinion of any Northern lowland ploughman’s wife, as she looks from her red-tiled cottage-door out upon the face of the corn-growing mother earth, which has given her sweet memories and a host of country neighbors and friends. Sixty years ago peasants could use their guns without let or hindrance, and it was then a common thing for a farm-laborer to go out and have a shot when no sportsman was in the way. Taking an odd shot now and then was never, and is not even now, looked upon by them as poaching. But a noted poacher, nicknamed the Otter, tells me, with a sigh, “Poaching is not what it once was!” And it is true. Not so very long ago it was a very profitable occupation, and comparatively respectable, before railways and telegraph wires and penny newspapers stereotyped metropolitan ideas into all and sundry. An old farmer is pointed out as having made all his money by systematic poaching, and an influential city official is said to have laid his early nest-egg by no other means than being a good shot where he had no invitation to be. To-day even rural society would look down upon a young farmer engaged in poaching. It is no longer sport to gentlemen, says the Otter, and is left to moral vagabonds, the waifs and strays, the parish loafers. The great strides of agriculture, the game-laws, and the artificial breeding of game have driven it into sneaking ways, and robbed it of its robust picturesque adventures. To excel in it a man must give up his nights and days to it—in short, he must become a specialist, and even then it hardly pays.