When the baronet had relieved his bursting heart, and vented his swelling indignation in the mode above named, and when Colonel Crop had sympathetically joined him in the execration of the transgressors of our most excellent and equal laws which regard the arrangement of game, then did Sir George proceed:
“Could you believe it, Spoonbill?—You know the pains I have taken with that wood—I say, could you believe it, after all the expense I have been at about it—after having six men sitting up night after night to watch it, that in one afternoon, and that in broad daylight, it should be almost cleared by those infernal villains?”
Here the baronet became angry again, and no wonder; it was beyond all endurance. Not only did he as a magistrate feel grieved at the violation of the laws, but as a gentleman and a man he was pained at the loss of those birds which he seemed born to shoot. The birds were gone and the poachers were gone; the first he could not shoot, and the last he could not commit. And what is the use of living in the country, if there are no birds to be shot and no poachers to be sent to gaol?
Pitying the sorrows of the magistrate, Colonel Crop replied, “Too bad, ’pon my honor.”
But Lord Spoonbill having recently quitted the university, in which he had been taught to investigate and seek out the connection of cause and effect, enquired:—
“But how could the rascals do all this without being detected, if you had men to keep the wood by night and day?”
“I will tell you,” said the baronet, whose violence seemed a little abated by the kind sympathy of his friends: “it was entirely owing to a rascally gamekeeper of mine, who, no longer ago than last Sunday week, instead of attending to his duty, must needs go sneaking to church. I saw the fellow there myself. He absolutely had the impudence to come into church when he knew I was there. I dismissed him however at a short notice. I was determined to have no church-going gamekeepers.”
“That going to church was abominable,” said the colonel.
“But I thought you had always guns in your plantations, Sir George?” said Lord Spoonbill.
“So I have,” replied the magistrate; “but unfortunately the guns had been discharged in the morning on some boys and girls who had gone to look for nuts; and as one of the boys was nearly killed, the under keeper took it into his fool’s head that he would not charge the guns again; so I gave him his discharge.”