He’d done it with a madman’s cleverness, to free his girl and get her back; and he went to a criminal lunatic asylum for his bit of work and bides there yet.  And as for Jenny, I left the rest to her and didn’t lift a finger to draw her to me no more.  She came, however, and felt the Lord had saved not only me alive, but her also.

For three year we worked at Oakshotts after that, as man and wife; and then I took my pension and went into Little Silver to live.  Because Sir Walter got it into his head to marry again before it was too late, and his new lady never liked me so well as he did.  He’d applauded me far too much to her, and ’tis always a fatal fact in human nature, that if you hear a fellow-creature praised up to the sky, your mind takes an instant set against ’em.

No.  XV

THE NIGHT-HAWK

I

There’s no doubt that a man’s opinions change with his business, because the point of view’s just everything.  What be good to you is what you want to happen and think ought to happen; and if it don’t happen, then you’m a bit fretful about it, and reckon there’s a screw loose somewhere in the order of things.  For instance, I be a gamekeeper to-day, and I take a view of fish and birds according; but once on a time I was a fly-by-night young rip of a poacher, and had a very different idea about feathers and fins.

“A fish be no more the bank-owner’s fish than the water in the river be his water!” That’s what I used to say.  Because a salmon—­he’s a sea-fish, and free as air and his own master.  Same with a bird.  How do I know whether ’twas Squire Tom, or Squire Dick, or Squire Harry as reared a pheasant I happen to knock over on a moony night?  Birds will fly, as Nature meant ’em; and, again, it may be just a wild bird, as never came out of no boughten egg at all, but belonged to the country, like his father and his grandfather afore him.  And so ’tis common property, same as the land did ought to be, and if I be clever enough to catch ’un and kill ’un—­why, so much the better for me!  All for free trade you see I was.  And in a poacher that must be the point of view.  But time and chance play all manner of funny pranks with a man; and time and chance it were that turned me from this dangerous walk of life into what I be now.  The way of it was simple enough, in a manner of speaking, yet I’m sure no such thing happened afore, or be like to hap again.

Woodcotes was a very great estate on the brink o’ Dartmoor.  In fact, the covers crept up the hills as far as the fierce winds would let ’em; and they was cold woods up over—­cold and rocky and better liked by the foxes than the pheasants.  But the birds done very well half a mile lower down, and the river that run through Woodcotes carried a lot of salmon at the proper time.  A ten-pound fish was no wonder, and more’n one twenty-pounder have left it in my memory.