"To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?" said his Grace, with all the courtly politeness of one in whose veins ran the blood of the Crusaders. Then, changing his tone, he spoke in fierce sailor-language: "Shiver my timbers! what makes you three stand there like that? Why, blank my eyes, you ought to——" What he was going to say will never be known, for Holes dashed forward.
"Silence, Duke," he said, sternly. "We come to tell you that there has been a desperate poaching affray. The leader of the gang lies insensible in Hagley Wood. Do you wish to know who he was?" So saying, he held up to the now terrified eyes of the Duke the tail-feather of a golden pheasant. "I found it in his waistcoat pocket," he said, simply.
"My son, my son!" shrieked the unfortunate Duke. "Oh Alured, Alured, that it should have come to this!" and he fell to the floor in convulsions.
"You will find Earl Mountravers at the cross-roads in Hagley Wood," said Holes to the Sergeant. "He is insensible."
The Earl was convicted at the following Assizes, and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. His ducal father has never recovered from the disgrace. Holes, as usual, made light of the matter and of his own share in it.
"I met the Earl," he told me afterwards, "as I was walking to your farmhouse. When he ventured to doubt one of my stories, I felled him to the earth. The rest was easy enough. Poachers? Oh dear no, there were none. But it is precisely in these cases that ingenuity comes in."
"Holes," I said, "I admire you more and more every day."
Joke for Joke.—A ruffian at Walsall, "for a joke," dropped a little boy over the bridge into the river. The inhabitants of that town took the cowardly brute to the same bridge, and dropped him over in the same place. Bravo men (and women) of Walsall! If the lex talionis, in the same spirit of impartial jocularity, could be applied as efficaciously to all "practical jokers," civilised Society might soon be rid of one of its most intolerable pests.