nd got it off
the old woman for five pound. She thought if I hadn't the hound I should
give it up, and she come and paid me out of gaol. It was a wonder as I
didn't break her neck; only her was a good woman, you see, to I. But I
wouldn't have parted with that hound for a quart-full of sovereigns.
Many's a time I've seed his name--they changed his name, of course--in
the papers for winning coursing matches. But we let that gent as bought
him have it warm; we harried his pheasants and killed the most of 'em.

'After that I came home, and took to it regular. It ain't no use unless
you do it regular. If a man goes out into the fields now and then
chance-like he don't get much, and is most sure to be caught--very
likely in the place of somebody else the keepers were waiting for and as
didn't come. I goes to work every day the same as the rest, only I
always take piece-work, which I can come to when I fancy, and stay as
late in the evening as suits me with a good excuse. As I knows
navigating, I do a main bit of draining and water-furrowing, and I gets
good wages all the year round, and never wants for a job. You see, I
knows more than the fellows as have never been at nothing but plough.

'The reason I gets on so well poaching is because I'm always at work out
in the fields, except when I goes with the van. I watches everything as
goes on, and marks the hare's tracks and the rabbit buries, and the
double mounds and little copses as the pheasants wanders off to in the
autumn. I keeps a 'nation good look-out after the keeper and his men,
and sees their dodges--which way they walks, and how they comes back
sudden and unexpected on purpose. There's mostly one about with his eyes
on me--when they sees me working on a farm they puts a man special to
look after me. I never does nothing close round where I'm at work, so he
waits about a main bit for nothing.

'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