'clock?"

"If I went at all I would go at once."

"Then you won't come?"

"No."

"I'll bet you a sovereign you never see a poacher, and then how
sad you will be in the morning! It will be much worse coming in
to breakfast with empty hands and a cold in the head, than going
in now. They will chaff then, I grant you."

"Well, then, they may chaff and be hanged, for I shan't go in
now."

Tom's interlocutor put his hands in the pockets of his heather
mixture shooting coat, and took a turn or two of some dozen
yards, backwards and forwards above the place where our hero was
sitting. He didn't like going in and facing the pool players by
himself; so he stopped once more and reopened the conversation.

"What do you want to do by watching all night, Brown?"

"To show the keeper and those fellows indoors that I mean what I
say. I said I'd do it, and I will."

"You don't want to catch a poacher, then?"

"I don't much care; I'll catch one if he comes in my way--or try
it on, at any rate."

"I say, Brown, I like that; as if you don't poach yourself. Why,
I remember when the Whiteham keeper spent the best part of a week
outside the college gates, on the lookout for you and Drysdale
and some other fellows."

"What has that to do with it?"

"Why, you ought to have more fellow-feeling. I suppose you go on
the principle of set a thief to catch a thief?"

Tom made no answer, and his companion went on.

"Come along, now, like a good fellow. If you'll come in now, we
can come out again all fresh, when the rest go to bed."

"Not we. I sha'n't go in. But you can come out again if you like;
you'll find me hereabouts."

The man in the heather mixture had now shot his last bolt, and
took himself off to the house, leaving Tom by the riverside. How
they got there may be told in a few words. After his morning's
fishing, and conversation with the keeper, he had gone in full of
his subject and propounded it at the breakfast table. His
strictures on the knife and razor business produced a rather warm
discussion, which merged in the question whether a keeper's life
was a hard one, till something was said implying that Wurley's
men were overworked. The master took this in high dudgeon, and
words ran high. In the discussion, Tom remarked (apropos of
night-work) that he would never ask another man to do what he
would not do himself; which sentiment was endorsed by, amongst
others, the man in the heather mixture. The host had reto