‘Not against me? Read it out, Smith, and see if every word of it don’t hit at me, and at my daughters, too, by—, worst of all! Read it out, I say!’
Lancelot hesitated; but the squire, who was utterly beside himself, began to swear at him also, as masters of hounds are privileged to do; and Lancelot, to whom the whole scene was becoming every moment more and more intensely ludicrous, thought it best to take up the paper and begin:—
‘A ROUGH RHYME ON A ROUGH MATTER.
‘The merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill,
Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
Under the moonlight still.
‘Leaping late and early,
Till under their bite and their tread
The swedes, and the wheat, and the barley,
Lay cankered, and trampled, and dead.
‘A poacher’s widow sat sighing
On the side of the white chalk bank,
Where under the gloomy fir-woods
One spot in the ley throve rank.
‘She watched a long tuft of clover,
Where rabbit or hare never ran;
For its black sour haulm covered over
The blood of a murdered man.
‘She thought of the dark plantation,
And the hares and her husband’s blood,
And the voice of her indignation
Rose up to the throne of God.
‘“I am long past wailing and whining—
I have wept too much in my life:
I’ve had twenty years of pining
As an English labourer’s wife.
‘“A labourer in Christian England,
Where they cant of a Saviour’s name,
And yet waste men’s lives like the vermin’s
For a few more brace of game.