Joan followed. The keeper was out, but the policeman searched the
Consumptive and found nothing.

The keeper said to me--even me, "My wife tells me they brought up a man
the other night, but he had no game on him. He had a woman with him that
fairly made the missus tremble. She was like a bloomin' giant out of a
show." I smiled, for the Consumptive had told me the whole tale. "My
'art was in my mouth," he remarked, and I do not wonder. Considering
that Joan was padded with the carcases of _nine_ rabbits under that
enormous cloak, it was quite natural for her bulk to seem abnormal. Ah!
if that intelligent policeman had probed the mysteries that underlay
the cloak! I am glad he did not, for the Consumptive is a most
entertaining beast of prey.

Another of our poaching men was obliged to borrow from me the money for
his dog licences, and in gratitude he allowed me to see his brace of
greyhounds work at midnight. People think that greyhounds cannot hunt by
scent, but this man has a tiny black and a large brindle that work like
basset-hounds. They are partners, and they have apparently a great
contempt for the rules of coursing. One waits at the bottom of a field,
while his partner quarters the ground with the arrowy fleetness of a
swallow. When a hare is put up by the beating dog she goes straight to
her doom.

It seems marvellous that such lawless desperadoes should be hanging
about London; but there they are, and they will have successors so long
as there is a head of game on the ground. The men are disreputable
loafers; they care only for drink and the pleasures of idleness. I grant
that. My only business is to show what a strange secret life, what a
strange secret society, may be studied almost within sight of St.
Paul's.

The very best and most daring poacher I know lives within
five-and-twenty minutes' journey from Waterloo. You may keep on framing
stringent game laws as long as you choose, but you cannot kill an
overmastering instinct.

I am not prepared to say, "Abolish the Game Laws;" but I do say that
those laws cause wild, worthless fellows to be regarded as heroes. No
stigma whatever attaches to a man who has been imprisoned for poaching;
he has won his Victoria Cross, and he is admired henceforth. You inflict
a punishment which confers honour on the culprit in the eyes of the only
persons for whose opinion he cares. Even the better sort of men who
haunt our public-houses are glad to meet and talk with th