Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England The Poacher, by Captain Marryat. ________________________________________________________________________ Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848. He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still in print. Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary genius. "The Poacher" was published in 1841, the eighteenth book to flow from Marryat's pen. This e-text was transcribed in 1998 by Nick Hodson, and was reformatted in 2003, and again in 2005. ________________________________________________________________________ THE POACHER, BY CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT. CHAPTER ONE. IN WHICH THERE IS MORE ALE THAN ARGUMENT. It was on a blusterous windy night in the early part of November, 1812, that three men were on the high road near to the little village of Grassford, in the south of Devonshire. The moon was nearly at the full, but the wild scud, and occasionally the more opaque clouds, passed over in such rapid succession, that it was rarely, and but for a moment or two, that the landscape was thrown into light and shadow; and the wind, which was keen and piercing, bent and waved the leafless branches of the trees which were ranged along the hedgerows, between which the road had been formed.