generally broken. Some country folk put them in their hats to cure headache, which is a very old superstition; but more in sport than earnest. There are no deer now in the park. There used to be a hundred years ago, and her husband has found several cast antlers in the wood. The best are up at the great house, but there is one on her staircase. Will I take a few chestnuts? It is winter—the proper time—and these are remarkably fine. No tree is apparently so capricious in its yield as the chestnut in English woods: the fruit of many is so small as to be worthless, or else it does not reach maturity. But these large ones are from a tree which bears a fine nut: her husband has them saved every year. Here also are half a dozen truffles if I will accept them: most that are found go up to the great house; but of late years they have not been sought for so carefully, because coming in quantities from abroad. These truffles are found, she believes, in the woods where the soil is chalky. She used to gather many native herbs; but tastes have changed, and new seasonings and sauces have come into fashion.
Out of doors in his work the assistant upon whom the gamekeeper places his chief reliance is his own son—a lad hardly taller than the gun he carries, but much older than would be supposed at first sight.
It is a curious physiological fact that although open-air life is so favourable to health, yet it has the apparent effect of stunting growth in early youth. Let two children be brought up together, one made to ‘rough’ it out of doors, and the other carefully tended and kept within; other things being equal, the boy of the drawing-room will be taller and to all appearance more developed than his companion. The labourers’ children, for instance, who play in the lonely country roads and fields all day, whose parents lock their cottage doors when leaving for work in the morning so that their offspring shall not gain entrance and get into mischief, are almost invariably short for their age. In their case something may be justly attributed to coarse and scanty food; but the children of
working farmers exhibit the same peculiarity, and although their food is not luxurious in quality, it is certainly not stinted in quantity. Some of the ploughboys and carters’ lads seem scarcely fit to be put in charge of the huge cart-horses who obey their shouted orders, their heads being but a little way above the shafts—mere infants to look at. Yet they are fourteen or fifteen years of age. With these, and with the sons of farmers who in like manner work in the field, the period of development comes later than with town-bred boys. After sixteen or eighteen, after years of hesitation as it were, they suddenly shoot up, and become great, hulking, broad fellows, possessed of immense strength. So the keeper’s boy is really much more a man than he appears, both in years and knowledge—meaning thereby that local intelligence, technical ability, and unwritten education which is the resultant of early practice and is quite distinct from book learning.
From his father he has imbibed the spirit of the woods and all the minutiæ of his art. First he learned to shoot; his highest ambition being satisfied in the beginning when permitted to carry the double-barrel home across the meadow. Then he was allowed occasionally to fire off the charges left in after the day’s work, before the gun was hung against the beam. Next, from behind the fallen trunk of an oak he took aim at a sitting rabbit which had raised himself on his hind-quarters to listen suspiciously—resting the heavy barrels on the tree, and made nervous by the whispered instructions from the keeper kneeling on the grass out of sight behind, ‘Aim at his shoulder, lad, if he be sitting sidelong; if a’ be got his back to ’ee aim at his poll.’ From this it was but a short step to be trusted with the single-barrel, and finally with the double; ultimately having one of his own and walking his own distinct rounds.
He is now a keen shot, even better than his father; for it is often observed that at a certain age young beginners in most manual arts reach an excellence which in later years fails them. Perhaps the muscles are more elastic, and respond instantaneously to the eye. This mere boy at snap-shooting in the ‘rough’ will beat crack sportsmen hollow. At the trap with pigeons he would probably fail; but in a narrow lane where the rabbits, driven out by the ferrets, just pop across barely a yard of open ground, where even a good shot may miss repeatedly, he is ‘death’ itself to the ‘bunnies.’ So, too, with a wood-hare—i.e. those hares that always lie in the woods as others do in the open fields and on the uplands. They are difficult to kill. They slip quietly out from the form in the rough grass under the ashstole, and all you have for guidance is the rustling and, perhaps, the tips of the ears, the body hidden by the tangled dead ferns and ‘rowetty’ stuff. When you try to aim, the barrel knocks against the ashpoles, which are inconveniently near together, or the branches get in the way, and the hare dodges round a tree, and your cartridge simply barks a bow and cuts a tall dead thistle in twain. But the keeper’s lad, who had waited for your fire, instantly follows, as it seems hardly lifting his gun to his shoulder, and the hare is stopped by the shot.