Of the few really attractive callings left, that of the poacher must be given a prominent place, especially in France, where the law is not too severe upon a man who tries to make an honest living by breaking the law so far as it relates to fish and game.  The excitement of catching wild creatures must be greatly increased by the risk that the hunter or fisher runs of being caught himself.  A poacher is by no means looked down upon in France.  He is considered a useful member of society, especially by hotel-keepers.  I know a very respectable beadle of a singularly pious parish who is an inveterate poacher.  On week-days he is slinking about the woods and rocks with his gun, and has generally a hare or a partridge in his bag; but on Sundays he wears a cocked hat, a gold-laced coat with a sword at his side, and he brings down his staff upon the church pavement with a thundering crack at those moments when the wool-gathering mind has to be hurried back and fixed upon the sacredness of the ritual.  He is a well-knit, agile fellow, who knows every inch of his ground, and he has led the gendarmes who have surprised him such dances over rocks, and placed them in such unpleasant positions, that they have come to treat him with the respect and consideration due to a man of his talent and resource.  The French poacher must not be judged by the same ethics as the English poacher.  Generally speaking, game is not preserved in France.  There are extensive tracts everywhere where anybody can shoot, provided that he has satisfied the license formality and observes the regulations with regard to the seasons.  The poacher is a man who thinks it waste of money to pay for a gun-license, and a waste of opportunities to respect the breeding season.  If he is a fisher, he not only scoffs at the close time, but uses illegal means to achieve his purpose, such as nets with meshes smaller than they should be, and the three-pronged spear.  In the Tarn and other French rivers the fish have been destroyed in a woeful manner by poison and dynamite, but it is the rock-blaster and the navvy, not the regular poacher, who is chiefly to be blamed for this.  Men who have the constant handling of dynamite, and who move from place to place, are rapidly destroying the life of the rivers and streams.  Having noted a good pool, they return by night and drop into it a dynamite cartridge, the explosion of which brings every fish, big and small, to the surface.  With these destructive causes, which do not belong to the natural order of things, should be mentioned another that does, namely, the frequency of floods in the season when the trout are spawning.  But for this drawback, and the unfair methods of fishing, the Upper Tarn would be one of the finest trout streams in the world.  As it is, an expert angler would find plenty of sport on the banks of the river above Le Rozier, and as all anglers are said to be lovers of nature, he would never be dull in the midst of such entrancing scenery as is to be found here.