In the afternoon, after it was all over, and just as Walnut and I were starting out to find our evening meal, there came a fresh invasion. It was headed by the stout new tenant, gorgeously arrayed in a check shooting suit, which in itself was enough to scare any self-respecting squirrel out of his wits, and with him walked five others like unto himself. He was evidently giving them all an account, a glorified account, of what had happened. By the way he pointed and ran a few steps, and let fly with his fist, it seemed as if he personally must have killed the whole gang of poachers, and they all listened attentively, though one or two laughed behind his back. I learnt afterwards from Cob that he had seen a man going about with the sacks full of dead pheasants the poachers had dropped. He had scattered them here and there throughout the wood. This had puzzled him much, and he had watched to see if they were left there; but, no; when the shoot was over the pheasants were picked up again with those that had really been shot by the guests, and in this way they made up quite a big bag. All this poaching business does not seem to have much to do with my life. Indirectly, however, it had, for the new tenant of the Hall was so angry about the poaching that on the very day after the battue he set a whole gang to work to run barbed wire—of all awful things!—round the whole of the coppice. Other men were put to lop the hedges close, and two new keepers engaged. The latter were worse than Tompkins. I suppose it was by way of justifying their existence that they walked about all day with their guns, firing at almost everything they could see that was not game. It became almost impossible to show our noses outside our homes during daylight, and many an evening Walnut and I went hungry to bed. Life became one prolonged dodging, for even when the new keepers were not about the workmen would take pot shots with stones at any of us they could view. Incidentally, too, they knocked over many a fat rabbit and dozens of the remaining pheasants. But of these proceedings their employer, intent on saving his coverts from the village poachers, remained in blissful ignorance.