"Here, don't you do anything of the kind, my lads," cried Oldroyd. "I forbid it, mind. Now get me my pony." "All right, sir; we'll mind what you says," said the man who had spoken, looking mirthfully round at his companions, one of whom at once accompanied him to a low shed where the pony was munching some hay. The willing little beast was saddled while Oldroyd walked up and down the path with an abundance of sweet-scented and gay old-fashioned flowers on either side. Carnations and scarlet lychnis, and many-headed sun flowers and the like, were bright in the morning sunshine, for all seemed to have been well tended; but, all at once, he came upon a terrible tell-tale bit of evidence of the last night's work upon the red bricks that formed the path--one that made him scrape off a little mould from the bed with his foot, and spread it over the ugly patch. "The cottage looks simple and innocent enough, with its roses, to be the home of peace," he muttered. "Ah! how man does spoil his life for the sake of coin. Thank you, my lad--that's right," he added, as his last night's messenger brought the pony to the gate. He mounted, and thrust a coin, that he could not spare, into his temporary ostler's hand. "Let him go. Fine morning, isn't it?" But Caleb held on sturdily by the pony's bridle, and thrust the piece back with an air of sturdy independence. "No, thankye, sir," he said. "Me and my mates don't want paying by a gentleman as comes to help one of us. 'Sides which, we're a-going to pay you; aren't we, lads?" "Ay, that's so," growled the others. "Don't take it." With the cleverness of a pickpocket, but the reverse action--say of a negative and not a positive pickpocket--the florin was thrust into Oldroyd's vest, and the man drew back, leaving the doctor to pursue his way. "Poachers even are not so black as they are painted," he said to himself as he cantered along, and then he fell to thinking of the girl he had seen that morning. "They've better daughters than you would have suspected, more affectionate wives, the best of neighbours, and companions as honest and faithful as one could wish; and, all the while, they are a set of confounded scoundrels and thieves, for it's just as dishonest to shoot and steal a man's carefully-raised foreign birds--his pheasants--as it is to break into a hen-roost. As to partridges and hares, of course they are wild things; but, so long as they lived and bred on one's land, they must be as genuine property as the apples and pears that grow upon a fellow's trees. Yes, poachers are thieves; and I daresay my friend there, with the shot-hole in his body, is as great a scoundrel as the worst." He laughed as he cantered along the soft green beside the road.