’You see by going out piece-work I visits every farm in the parish.  The other men they works for one farmer for two or three or maybe twenty years; but I goes very nigh all round the place—­a fortnight here and a week there, and then a month somewhere else.  So I knows every hare in the parish, and all his runs and all the double mounds and copses, and the little covers in the corners of the fields.  When I be at work on one place I sets my wires about half a mile away on a farm as I ain’t been working on for a month, and where the keeper don’t keep no special look-out now I be gone.  As I goes all round, I knows the ways of all the farmers, and them as bides out late at night at their friends’, and they as goes to bed early; and so I knows what paths to follow and what fields I can walk about in and never meet nobody.

’The dodge is always to be in the fields and to know everybody’s ways.  Then you may do just as you be a-mind.  All of ’em knows I be a-poaching; but that don’t make no difference for work; I can use my tools, and do it as well as any man in the country, and they be glad to get me on for ’em.  They farmers as have got their shooting be sharper than the keepers, and you can’t do much there; but they as haven’t got the shooting don’t take no notice.  They sees my wires in the grass, and just looks the other way.  If they sees I with a gun I puts un in ditch till they be gone by, and they don’t look among the nettles.

’Some of them as got land by the wood would like I to be there all day and night.  You see, their clover and corn feeds the hares and pheasants; and then some day when they goes into the market and passes the poultry-shop there be four or five score pheasants a-hanging up with their long tails a-sweeping in the faces of them as fed ’em.  The same with the hares and the rabbits; and so they’d just as soon as I had ’em—­and a dalled deal sooner—­out of spite.  Lord bless you! if I was to walk through their courtyards at night with a sack over my shoulders full of you knows what, and met one of ’em, he’d tell his dog to stop that yowling, and go in doors rather than see me.  As for the rabbits, they hates they worse than poison.  They knocks a hare over now and then themselves on the quiet—­bless you!  I could tell tales on a main few, but I bean’t such a fellow as that.

’But, you see I don’t run no risk except from the keeper hisself, the men as helps un, and two or three lickspittles as be always messing round after a ferreting job or some wood-cutting, and the Christmas charities.  It be enough to make a man sick to see they.  This yer parish be a very big un, and a be preserved very high, and I can do three times as much in he as in the next un, as ain’t much preserved.  So I sticks to this un.