the country, was a sorry, and possibly might
not be a very effectual one. Do what he would, his domestic sky was
likely to be overcast to the end of the day. Thus he brooded, and his
resentment gathered force. He craved a means of striking one blow back
at the cause of his cheerless plight, while he was still on the scene
of his discomfiture. For some minutes no method suggested itself, and
then he had an idea.

Coming to a sudden resolution, he hastened along the garden, and
entered the one attached to the next cottage, which had formerly been
the dwelling of a game-keeper. Tim descended the path to the back of
the house, where only an old woman lived at present, and reaching the
wall he stopped. Owing to the slope of the ground the roof-eaves of
the linhay were here within touch, and he thrust his arm up under them,
feeling about in the space on the top of the wall-plate.

"Ah, I thought my memory didn't deceive me!" he lipped silently.

With some exertion he drew down a cobwebbed object curiously framed in
iron, which clanked as he moved it. It was about three feet in length
and half as wide. Tim contemplated it as well as he could in the dying
light of day, and raked off the cobwebs with his hand.

"That will spoil his pretty shins for'n, I reckon!" he said.

It was a man-trap.

CHAPTER XLVII.

Were the inventors of automatic machines to be ranged according to the
excellence of their devices for producing sound artistic torture, the
creator of the man-trap would occupy a very respectable if not a very
high place.

It should rather, however, be said, the inventor of the particular form
of man-trap of which this found in the keeper's out-house was a
specimen. For there were other shapes and other sizes, instruments
which, if placed in a row beside one of the type disinterred by Tim,
would have worn the subordinate aspect of the bears, wild boars, or
wolves in a travelling menagerie, as compared with the leading lion or
tiger. In short, though many varieties had been in use during those
centuries which we are accustomed to look back upon as the true and
only period of merry England--in the rural districts more
especially--and onward down to the third decade of the nineteenth
century, this model had borne the palm, and had been most usually
followed when the orchards and estates required new ones.

There had been the toothless variety used by the softer-hearted
landlords--quite contemptible in t