The greatest character we ever possessed in the village was undoubtedly Tom Peregrine, the keeper.
"A man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again."
The eldest son of the principal tenant on the manor, and belonging to a family of yeoman farmers who had been settled in the place for a hundred years, he suddenly found that "he could not a-bear farming," and took up his residence as "an independent gentleman" in a comfortable cottage at the gate of the manor house. Then he started a "sack" business--a trade which is often adopted in these parts by those who are in want of a better. The business consists in buying up odds and ends of sacks, and letting them out on hire at a handsome profit. He was always intensely fond of shooting and fishing; indeed, the following description which Sir Roger de Coverley gave the "Spectator" of a "plain country fellow who rid before them," when they were on their way to the assizes, suits him exactly. "He is a yeoman of about an hundred pounds a year; and knocks down a dinner with his gun twice or thrice a week. He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges: in short, he is a very sensible man, shoots flying, and has been several times foreman of the petty jury."
Perhaps with regard to the "shoots flying" the reservation should be added, that should he have seen a covey of partridges "bathering" in a ploughed field within convenient distance of a stone wall or thick fence, he might not have been averse to knocking over a brace for supper on the ground. And we had almost forgotten to explain that it was for the manor-house table that he used to knock down a dinner with his gun twice or thrice a week, and not his own--for, some years ago, he persuaded the squire to take him into his service as gamekeeper. When we came to take up our abode at the manor, we found that he was a sort of standing dish on the place. Such a keen sportsman, it was explained, was better in our service than kicking his heels about the village and on his father's farm as an independent gentleman. And so this is how Tom Peregrine came into our service. For my part I liked the man; he was so delightfully mysterious. And the place would never have been the same without him; for he became part and parcel with the trees and the fields and every living thing. Nor would the woods and the path by the brook and the breezy wolds ever have been quite the same if his quaint figure had no longer appeared suddenly there. Many a time was I startled by the sudden apparition of Tom Peregrine when out shooting on the hill; he seemed to spring up from the ground like "Herne the Hunter"--
"Shaggy and lean and shrewd. With pointed ears
And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him."
The above lines of Cowper's exactly, describe the keeper's Irish terrier; the dog was almost as deep and mysterious as the man himself. When in the woods, Tom's attitude and gait would at times resemble the movements of a cock pheasant: now stealing along for a few yards, listening for the slightest sound of any animal stirring in the underwood; now standing on tiptoe for a time, with bated breath. Did a blackbird--that dusky sentinel of the woods--utter her characteristic note of warning, he would whisper, "Hark!" Then, after due deliberation, he would add, "'Tis a fox!" or, "There's a fox in the grove," and then he would steal gently up to try to get a glimpse of reynard. He never looked more natural than when carrying seven or eight brace of partridges, four or five hares, and a lease of pheasants; it was a labour of love to him to carry such a load back to the village after a day's shooting. In his pockets alone he could stow away more game than most men can conveniently carry on their backs.
He was the best hand at catching trout the country could produce. With a rod and line he could pull them out on days when nobody else could get a "rise." He could not understand dry-fly fishing, always using the old-fashioned sunk fly. "Muddling work," he used to call the floating method of fly fishing.
But Tom Peregrine was cleverer with the landing-net than with the rod. Any trout he could reach with the net was promptly pulled out, if we particularly wanted a fish. Then he would talk all day about any subject under the sun: politics, art, Roman antiquities, literature, and every form of sport were discussed with equal facility.
One day, when I was engaged in a slight controversy with his own father, the keeper said to me: "I shouldn't take any notice whatever of him"; then he added, with a sigh, "These Gloucestershire folk are comical people."
"Ah! 'tis a wise son that knows his own father in Gloucestershire, isn't it, Peregrine?" said I, putting the Shakespearian cart before the horse.