During the season there are almost daily exchanges of shot. Often a man is killed, which means jail, penitentiary, scaffold. All for a miserable rabbit! Remnants of the feudalism of birth which the effort of revolutions has merely replaced by the feudalism of money. The worst of it is that gamekeepers and poachers, mutually exasperated, cling to their quarrel, and that a taste for brigandage develops in men diverted from the unremunerative tilling of the soil by the daily temptation of booty. Deal as harshly as you may with the poacher, you will not succeed in discouraging him. Has anything ever cured a devotee of roulette? And to the excitement of gambling, in this case, is added the attraction of danger. There is no cure for it. The question of increasing the penalty for poaching often comes up. There will be long discussion before anything is ever done. The discrepancy would be too great between the misdeed and the punishment. And the matter of elections enters into it. No one is anxious to make too violent enemies among the citizen electors. Entirely different is the question of poaching in the happy regions--there are not many left in France--where preserved hunting is still at the rhetorical stage. There the poacher is merely a hunter without a permit, and as no such thing exists as a peasant whom a hare has never tempted to use his gun, and as a natural understanding unites all those who are compelled to pay taxes against the State which represents taxation and statute labour, never will you find a field labourer ready to admit that a shot, in order to be lawful, needs the seal of a tax gatherer. The poacher on free territory, therefore, does not hide as does the poacher on preserved lands. He plays a sort of tag with the rural guard, who is by no means eager to meet him, and with the occasional _gendarmes_, whose cocked hats and baldricks make them conspicuous from afar. Following along hedges, looking for burrows, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the ground, he scents out the wild creatures and knows the art of capturing them.