The farmers of Lindsey kept each a good nag, for market service, and so forth; but it was a very, very scarce thing to find a blood horse in their stables; and when their dames went to market, it was on the pillion-seat, behind the farmer himself, and not in the modern kickshaw gig. There were none of your strongholds of starvation, which the famishing thousands call "Bastiles," in those days; and a horn of good humming ale, and a motherly slice of bread and cheese, awaited the acceptance of any poor man who happened to be journeying, and called either at the hall of the squire or at the cottages of any of the farmers on his extensive estates.
Kiah Dobson was nearing his cottage one November evening, a little before dusk, when a figure caught his eye, the sight of which roused his gall,—and yet Kiah was by no means a choleric or hasty-tempered man. It was Raven Dick, the poacher, that the farmer was so wroth to see; for Dick was beheld as the farmer had beheld him nearly fifty times before,—with a bundle of dead hares under his arm. The farmer turned to cross the home-close in another direction, willing, as it seemed, to give Dick another fair opportunity of getting safely away. But "the devil was in Dick for impudence," as Kiah used often to say,—"if you gave him an inch, he would be sure to take an ell!" Not content with imposing on farmer Dobson's good-nature forty-nine times in the course of his harum-scarum life, he must e'en "try it on" for the fiftieth, and so made the experiment just once too often.
"Farmer! how d'ye feel yoursen?" said Dick, striding up to Kiah Dobson, and looking him full in the face, as bold as a bull-dog.
"Better than thou'lt feel, scapegrace! when thou gets thy hempen collar on!" replied the farmer, snarling as angrily as a mastiff when he doesn't like you.
"May be the thread of it isn't spun yet," retorted Dick, mocking the farmer's angry tone.
"Surely, old Nick himself isn't more impudent than his children that wear his own colour!" exclaimed Kiah, darting a withering look at Dick's black face, for Dick's skin was even swarthier than a gypsy's; and I might as well say now as at any other time, that the sable shade of Dick's countenance, coupled with their knowledge of his wild way of life, were the emphatic reasons why his neighbours gave him the epithet of "Raven."
Now, above all things, Dick did not like these reflections on his unfair colour; so, with something in the shape of an oath, Dick turned his heel in dudgeon, and seemed, not at all to the farmer's displeasure, to be bent on making his way home.
Dame Dobson, who was a stout country-wife, and was labouring lustily at her churn, and scolding one of her maids, who had been idling, just as her husband entered the cottage, caught a sight of the well-known poacher with the hares under his arm ere the farmer could close the door, and, with the anger that her maid had kindled, was ill prepared to brook new provocation.
"Shame on thee, Kiah, for letting that rascal escape so often!" she exclaimed, screaming so loudly that Dick could hear her words distinctly, though nearly half way over the close; "it will come to the Squire's ears at long-last, thou may depend on't! and then thou knowst what will follow!"