A genuine poacher has great force of character; he has a genius for field and woodcraft. He is the eldest survivor of rustic romance. His wild life is tinged with the love of adventure, the love of moon and stars, the knowledge of the seasons, the haunts and habits of game, and the power of trapping rabbits in dark woodland glades. No man knows more intimately the night-side of Nature between the chilly hours of midnight and sunrise. In this cold-blooded age there are always some Quixotic individuals, born in the outwardly sleepy villages and lifeless farmsteads, with the love of midnight adventure, who wage long warfare against the game-laws, and who only knuckle under to the law’s severity when their health gives way or an enemy turns informer. “Rheumatics plays the mischief with poaching!” exclaims the Otter, referring to the long night-watches in wet ditches and beside hedges for hares on the lea fields. Irrespective of all thought of gain, there is an infatuation to eager spirits in this midnight sport. It appeals to strong, healthy, brave men. Charles Kingsley, in “The Bad Squire,” with its strong sympathy and feeling, and its cry of “blood” on all the squire owned, from the foreign shrub to the game he sold, gives us the poacher’s wife view, a view we are too apt to ignore or forget, with the weary eyes and heavy heart, that grow light only with weeping, and go wandering into the night. We forget too often that in the hearts of common folk there is the glamor of poetic romance about poaching, and a bitter hatred toward the game-laws. Like Rizpah’s son, many a lad has had no other incentive than that “The farmer dared us to do it,” and that he found it sweetened by the secret sympathy of the people. Too often, I fear, the game-laws dare a brave rustic into poaching: he has only this one way left to satisfy the insatiable British thirst for field sport. It is gravely whispered that some of the most striking men have tasted its romance; and if all stories be true, the master of the English drama owes to an unlucky deer-poaching incident the lucky turn in his career which sent him to London and to writing plays, and poachers may reasonably claim Shakspere as their patron saint.