No one would have recognized in the well-appointed and terribly respectable head keeper who touched his hat to the party of gentlemen as they emerged upon the lawn, the former village reprobate--Blogg, the whilom King's Warren poacher. But so it was. By some strange fatality or other your poacher either becomes a confirmed reprobate or blossoms into the very best kind of gamekeeper. Perhaps it's on the principle of set a thief to catch a thief that those estates are best preserved where the head keeper has been poacher in his youth. Just as the man who has risen from the ranks makes the sternest martinet and the strictest disciplinarian, so the reformed poacher is invariably the prince of gamekeepers, when honest. The vicar of King's Warren was a High Churchman. I believe he would have ridden to hounds with pleasure but for the fact that he found it impossible to find anything up to his weight. But he sternly drew the line at carrying a gun. Though the vicar denied himself this pleasure, he joined the shooting party, for his intense appreciation of the culinary art made violent exercise a necessity of his existence. As Mrs. Haggard and the vicar's wife sat and chatted over the little details of life at the village of King's Warren, the happy home of the former's girlhood, Mrs. Haggard remarked to her companion that it was strange that they had not heard a shot for at least half an hour. As she uttered the words Lord Spunyarn entered the room, pale and out of breath, and evidently hardly able to control his emotion. "What! back so soon, Lord Spunyarn? Is anything the matter?" said Mrs. Dodd. "Something dreadful has happened." "Has there been an accident? Has anything happened to George?" cried the mother, and the colour left her lips as she rose excitedly. At that moment the old lord entered the room. "George is safe, dear madam," said her husband's old friend, "but I have hurried here as the bearer of bad news, and I must bid you prepare for the worst." "Gad, sir, don't keep us in suspense," cried old Lord Pit Town, with the irritability of age. "Is Lucius the victim?" "No, the boys are safe, dear Mrs. Haggard," he continued. "My old friend is badly hurt. In passing through a hedge----" But Mrs. Haggard had fainted in the arms of the vicar's wife. And then Lord Spunyarn told his tale to the old man, while Mrs. Dodd and the women-servants who, unsummoned, had appeared upon the scene, busied themselves around the fainting woman. It appeared that in getting through a hedge to pick up a bird that, wounded, had managed to struggle through it, Reginald Haggard's gun had suddenly exploded and lodged a charge of shot in his chest. It was not from carelessness; but Haggard's foot had caught in a rabbit burrow, and as he fell the accident happened. Before their eyes the thing had taken place. There was nothing mysterious about it. It was terribly sudden, that was all.