e who was
mean enough to pay his butcher's and poulterer's bills out of
their pockets.

Alas that the manly instinct of sport which is so strong in all
of us Englishmen--which sends Oswells single handed against the
mightiest beasts that walk the earth, and takes the poor cockney
journeyman out a ten miles' walk almost before daylight, on the
rare summer holiday mornings, to angle with rude tackle in
reservoir or canal--should be dragged through such mire as this
in many an English shire in our day. If English landlords want to
go on shooting game much longer, they must give up selling it.
For if selling game becomes the rule, and not the exception (as
it seems likely to do before long), good-bye to sport in England.
Every man who loves his country more than his pleasure or his
pocket--and, thank God, that includes the great majority of us
yet, however much we may delight in gun and rod, let any
demagogue in the land say what he pleases--will cry, "Down with
it," and lend a hand to put it down for ever.

But to return to our perch on the Hawk's Lynch above Englebourn
village. The rector is the fourth of his race who holds the
family living--a kind, easy-going, gentlemanly old man, a Doctor
of Divinity, as becomes his position, though he only went into
orders because there was the living ready for him. In his day he
had been a good magistrate and neighbour, living with and much in
the same way as the squires round about. But his contemporaries
had dropped off one by one; his own health had long been failing;
his wife was dead; and the young generation did not seek him. His
work and the parish had no real hold on him; so he had nothing to
fall back on, and had become a confirmed invalid, seldom leaving
the house and garden even to go to church, and thinking more of
his dinner and his health than of all other things in earth or
heaven.

The only child who remained at home with him was a daughter, a
girl of nineteen or thereabouts, whose acquaintance we shall make
presently, and who was doing all that a good heart and sound head
prompted in nursing an old hypochondriac, and filling his place
in the parish. But though the old man was weak and selfish, he
was kind in his way, and ready to give freely or do anything that
his daughter suggested for the good of his people, provided the
trouble were taken off his shoulders. In the year before our tale
opens, he had allowed some thirty acres of his glebe to be
parcelled out