The Sporting Dictionary and Rural Repository, Volume 2 (of 2): Of General Information upon Every Subject Appertaining to the Sports of the FieldTaplin, William
Science
The Sporting Dictionary and Rural Repository, Volume 2 (of 2): Of General Information upon Every Subject Appertaining to the Sports of the Field
Taplin, William
Hunting -- Dictionaries; Sports -- Dictionaries
should be patiently held before the horse _twice_ or _thrice_ in every
hour for some minutes: from the great internal heat, he is frequently
induced to swallow a quart or two at each time; although, if offered and
taken away _in haste_, he might invariably decline it. It is only by
such persevering attention, both NIGHT and DAY, any expectation of cure
can be entertained.
PLUMAGE.—The feathers upon every kind of fowl, wild or tame, is so
termed: if speckled, or interspersed with different streaks, or opposite
lights and shades, it is then called variegated plumage. If a GAME COCK
is bred perfectly WHITE, he is called a SMOCK.
POACHERS—are those determined destructive nocturnal depredators, by whom
the game is so shamefully reduced in opposition to all LAW, and defiance
of all ORDER, from one extremity of the kingdom to the other. This head
cannot be better elucidated, than by transcribing literally, from the
recent work of a writer of much celebrity, his judicious remarks upon
the subject.
"It is, perhaps, among that description of persons well known by the
name of _poachers_, that the greater number of those are trained to
rapine, who infest every rural neighbourhood with their petty thefts,
and whose dexterity almost bids defiance to precaution. Accustomed, in
the ensnaring of game, to the secresy of fraud, and committing their
depredations amidst the silence of night, those horrors, and that
consequent dread, which frequently deters from the commission of great
offences, gradually lose their effect. Solitude and darkness, which have
wherewithal to appal the human mind in its first deviations into guilt,
are divested of their terror in those pilfering pursuits; and the
consequence is sufficiently well known to all, who, in the capacity of
magistrates, are called to sit in judgment on the delinquency of public
offenders. It is to this initiation they ascribe their subsequent
enormities.
"When guilt, however venal, becomes, by repetition, familiar to the
mind, it is not in the power of the ignorant and uneducated to restrain
its excesses; they cannot arrest their career of iniquity; they cannot
chalk out the line of wrong beyond which they will not pass. Confining
their first nocturnal excursions to the snaring of HARES, and netting of
PARTRIDGES, whenever they have a less booty than _usual_, they are
tempted to compensate the deficiency by petty plunder of some other
kind, and the _log-pile_, the _stack_, the _fold_, the _hen-roost_, all
in turn, pay tribute to the prowling vagabond, who fills as he can that
void in his "capacious bag," which has been left by his want of success
as a POACHER.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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