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enclosed it, to your great distress, when we were on the far side of the world.'
    'Certainly they inclosed Woolhampton common and it did grieve me. But this is another piece of common land called Simmon's Lea - it was always my favourite - and now they want to inclose it too. Over my dead body! Such fun I had here when I was a boy: mostly alone but sometimes with young fellows from the farms or the village - netting, ferreting, drawing the mere, poaching on Mr Baldwin's land, leading his keepers a rare old dance, wild-fowling in a hard winter - Heneage Dundas used to come down sometimes. And when the Blackstone came over in this part of the country we would always find a fox in the furze. Did you notice that old chap in the stable-yard?'
    'Certainly.'
    'That was Harding, a real country-man, born and bred in the parish - there are a score of Hardings here. He began as a kennel-boy with the Blackstone, where his father was huntsman; then he whipped-in for another pack, but having a nasty fall he took to being an under-keeper beyond Wimborne, and then after a spell as a water-bailiff he came to us as keeper, oh, well before I was born. I can't remember a time without him. I am no expert on birds, as you are very well aware, but what little I do know I learnt from him. This very path leads to a place where he showed me a nightjar's egg, lying there on the ground. Have you ever seen a nightjar's egg, Stephen?'
    'I have; but it was brought to me. I have never found one.'
    'Then I do not have to tell you how beautiful they are. Then as for fishing and setting snares and finding a hare, and shooting for that matter, he - oh, well shot, Stephen.'
    The spaniel brought the rabbit back. Stephen praised the gun, as pretty a gun as he had ever seen. 'Do you preserve, at all, Jack?' he asked as they went on.
    'Oh no. I just take a gun out from time to time, more for the walk than anything else: I love this common. If a shot offers, well and good, but I have no notion of breeding birds up in order to knock them down again. And a shot does offer most days, because many of my neighbours do preserve, and do breed up pheasants by wholesale, so when they have one of these big shoots, with driven birds, a good many come on to our land. Some of these people resent it, and one mean-spirited sodomite says that my reason for opposing the enclosure is that I like getting high-reared game for nothing. There is a lot of ill-feeling ... and that fellow,' said Jack, cocking his head to bring his good eye to bear in what was now a habitual gesture, 'that fellow on the pony, coming into sight behind those willows, is a perfect example. A sailor, I am sorry to say, and a scrub.'
    'That sounds a contradiction in terms.'
    'You are truly good to say so, Stephen; but when you consider... However, this fellow Griffiths is not so much as a sailor, neither. You will remember him in Valletta and
    Gib as a commander - he had the Espi�e and then the Argus - a big black-haired red-faced domineering cove, younger than me but with much more influence - a member for Carton and Stranraer's heir, his nephew - and he was made post in the same month. But after a cruise or two in the Terpsichore, when he had an ugly mutiny on his hands, he refused commands that would have taken him to the West Indies. He prefers farming, high farming; he has a deal of land over towards Paston. He was the prime mover in enclosing Woolhampton Common - by the way, we say either Woolcombe or Woolhampton here: it's all one - and now he wants to do the same to Simmon's Lea. He and his friends want everything laid out like military camp, with straight lines and right angles. High yields and high rents, of course, and the game-laws enforced to the letter Z. I may malign him, but just as he seems not to know the odds between a ship kept in apparent good order by Botany Bay methods and one which is in really good order, seamanlike order, because officers and men know their duty and do it without being