“On Sir Benjamin’s game!” said Sir Roger Rockville; “on all our game. He has encouraged the poachers to an audacity never known before. They all say, ‘There, Mr. Degge has shown his sense. He knows that game is everybody’s.’ Our keepers have now no rest day nor night. The fields, the woods, the copses swarm with poachers. After them, and they are over the hedges into Degge’s land, and touch ’em there who dare. Sooner than we should convict them, he would give every man of them a keeper’s licence. That arch scamp, Joe Scammell, I am told, sends cart-loads of hares and pheasants to Castleborough every week. Can no one lay hold of that fellow? His offences are now so many, he might be transported.” “But what matters half-a-dozen Scammells being sent out of the country,” said Sir Thomas Tenterhook, “when every labourer or artizan is encouraged by the example of Degge, who is only a poacher on a larger scale? They preach that all must live. Now let me tell you something. Close to my estate, and by the high road to Castleborough, there lives a shoemaker, in a village, who was had up and fined for shooting a hare in his garden last winter but one. That fellow the very next season took out a licence, for the right of a shot over his own garden, and he could not be turned out of it. So Degge made him one of his keepers, and thus qualified him; and all this last autumn and winter, he has sat at his window and shot my hares and pheasants. Not content with daylight, he has kept this fine game by moonlight. Gad! the fellow is making a little fortune out of it.” There was a universal murmur of indignation at such an instance of unheard-of audacity. “Yes,” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed, “that is precisely the case in point. My game is drained off by constantly getting into some one of Degge’s fields, and being killed by one of his stocking-weaver acquaintances. I say, Mr. Markham, spite of your praises of Simon Degge, the man is a nuisance, a sheer, intolerable unmitigated nuisance.” “Hear! hear!” resounded round the dinner-table, in which Mr. Markham, rather alarmed for his reputation, joined; and the ladies rose, to retire to the drawing-room, expressing their hearty approbation.