cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him."

The above lines of Cowper's exactly, describe the keeper's Irish
terrier; the dog was almost as deep and mysterious as the man himself.
When in the woods, Tom's attitude and gait would at times resemble the
movements of a cock pheasant: now stealing along for a few yards,
listening for the slightest sound of any animal stirring in the
underwood; now standing on tiptoe for a time, with bated breath. Did a
blackbird--that dusky sentinel of the woods--utter her characteristic
note of warning, he would whisper, "Hark!" Then, after due deliberation,
he would add, "'Tis a fox!" or, "There's a fox in the grove," and then
he would steal gently up to try to get a glimpse of reynard. He never
looked more natural than when carrying seven or eight brace of
partridges, four or five hares, and a lease of pheasants; it was a
labour of love to him to carry such a load back to the village after a
day's shooting. In his pockets alone he could stow away more game than
most men can conveniently carry on their backs.

He was the best hand at catching trout the country could produce. With a
rod and line he could pull them out on days when nobody else could get a
"rise." He could not understand dry-fly fishing, always using the
old-fashioned sunk fly. "Muddling work," he used to call the floating
method of fly fishing.

But Tom Peregrine was cleverer with the landing-net than with the rod.
Any trout he could reach with the net was promptly pulled out, if we
particularly wanted a fish. Then he would talk all day about any subject
under the sun: politics, art, Roman antiquities, literature, and every
form of sport were discussed with equal facility.

One day, when I was engaged in a slight controversy with his own
father, the keeper said to me: "I shouldn't take any notice whatever of
him"; then he added, with a sigh, "These Gloucestershire folk are
comical people."

"Ah! 'tis a wise son that knows his own father in Gloucestershire, isn't
it, Peregrine?" said I, putting the Shakespearian cart before the horse.

"Yes, it be, to be sure, to be sure," was the reply. "I can't make 'em
out nohow; they're funny folk in Gloucestershire."

He gave me the following account of the "chopping" of one of our foxes:
"I knew there was a fox in the grove; and there, sure enough, he was.
But when he went toward the 'bruk,' the hounds come along and _give him
the meeting_; and then th