Simon Degge’s purchase of this farm was a subject of great annoyance to Sir Benjamin, who was very anxious to have it, as it lay alongside of his woods and game preserves. The fact of seeing his pheasants, which had found a favourite, because a plentiful feeding-place, on this farm, shot down by Mr. Degge and his numerous friends from Castleborough, was, in truth, as great a misfortune as Sir Benjamin well could imagine to himself. For a quarter of a mile these woods of his ran along the corn-lands of this farm. The previous farmer had complained in vain of the depredations of the game—hares, rabbits and pheasants—which issued out of the preserves in legions. He was told that he must fence them out, but the fence was Sir Benjamin’s; and the farmer dared no more to put a stick into it to stop their runs, than he dared have taken a stick to Sir Benjamin himself. His growing corn was trodden down by the hares and rabbits; the hares, according to their habit, cut paths through it, and made playgrounds in it; the rabbits cropped it as fast as it grew for fifty yards, all along the woodsides. What escaped and went into ear was regularly eaten up by the pheasants. They sat on the hedges along the woodside as tame as barn-door fowls, knowing well that they were under powerful protection, and during harvest, if a daring waggoner snapped his whip at them, they disdained to move. On a fine afternoon, so long as there was anything to pick on the stubble, you might see them feeding in flocks of a hundred together, as quietly as fowls in a barn-yard. The nuisance of this great game-manufactory, ruinous to the farmer, had compelled one tenant after another to throw the farm up. In fact, no one knowing the farm would take it; they were only men from a distance who did so, and were in terrible but vain trepidation when they discovered the real nature of the game-preserving incubus that lay upon the land. In itself the land was excellent, and, therefore, a stranger examining it, who had not already lived in a game-preserving country, was readily taken in by it. If the farmer, on discovering the alarming evil, complained, the answer from Sir Benjamin’s steward was, as I have said, “You can stop the runs in the hedges but if the farmer did stop them, he found the stoppage very soon removed by the keepers in their nocturnal rounds. One bold farmer had kept terriers to scour the woodsides; but he soon found his dogs, when they followed the game into the wood, shot, or trapped in the iron traps so freely used by our English gamekeepers, who are the greatest and most extensive animal torturers that the world ever knew.