will be found much about in the right place; nay, I verily believe it has more of natural justice, human kindness, and right sympathies in it, than are to be found in many of those hard and hollow cones that beat beneath the twenty-guinea waistcoats of a Burghardt or a Buckmaster.  Ay, give me the fluttering inhabitant of Ben Burke’s cowskin vest; it is worth a thousand of those stuffed and artificial denizens, whose usual nest is figured satin and cut velvet.

Ben stole—­true—­he did not deny it; but he stole naught but what he fancied was wrongfully withheld him:  and, if he took from the rich, who scarcely knew he robbed them, he shared his savoury booty with the poor, and fed them by his daring.  Like Robin Hood of old, he avenged himself on wanton wealth, and frequently redressed by it the wrongs of penury.  Not that I intend to break a lance for either of them, nor to go any lengths in excusing; slight extenuation is the limit for prudent advocacy in these cases.  Robin Hood and Benjamin Burke were both of them thieves; bold men—­bad men, if any will insist upon the bad; they sinned against law, and order, and Providence; they dug rudely at the roots of social institutions; they spoke and acted in a dangerous fashion about rights of men and community of things.  But set aside the statutes of Foresting and Venery, disfranchise pheasants, let it be a cogent thing that poverty and riches approach the golden mean somewhat less unequally, and we shall not find much of criminality, either in Ben or Robin.

For a general idea, then, of our poaching friend:—­he is a gigantic, black-whiskered, humorous, ruddy mortal, full of strange oaths, which we really must not print, and bearded like the pard, and he tumbles in amongst our humble family party, with—­

“Bless your honest heart, Roger! what makes you look so sodden?  I’m a lord, if your eyes a’n’t as red as a hedge-hog’s; and all the rest o’ you, too; why, you seem to be pretty well merry as mutes.  Ha!  I see what it is,” added Ben, pouring forth a benediction on their frugal supper; “it’s that precious belly-ache porridge that’s a-giving you all the ’flensy.  Tip it down the sink, dame, will you now? and trust to me for better.  Your Tom here, Roger, ‘s a lad o’ mettle, that he is; ay, and that old iron o’ yours as true as a compass; and the pheasants would come to it, all the same as if they’d been loadstoned.  Here, dame, pluck the fowl, will you:  drop ’em, Tom.”—­And Thomas Acton flung upon the table a couple of fine cock-pheasants.

Roger, Mary, and Grace, who were well accustomed to Ben Burke’s eloquent tirades, heard the end of this one with anxiety and silence; for Tom had never done the like before.  Grace was first to expostulate, but was at once cut short by an oath from her brother, whose evident state of high excitement could not brook the semblance of reproof.  Mary Acton’s marketing glance was abstractedly fixed upon the actual corpus delicti; each fine plump bird, full-plumaged, young-spurred; yes, they were still warm, and would eat tender, so she mechanically began to pluck them; while, as for poor downcast Roger, he remembered, with a conscience-sting that almost made him start, his stolen bit of money in the morning—­so, how could he condemn?  He only looked pityingly on Thomas, and sighed from the bottom of his heart.