ll the intelligent. The skilful poacher who harried the
sacred bird was fast becoming extinct.

Then, at last, he came to the important matter of the wiles of the
poacher; and the thirsty ears of the Terror drank in his golden words.
He discussed the methods of the gang of poachers and the single poacher
with intelligent relish and more sympathy than was perhaps wise to
display in the presence of the young. The Terror came from that talk
with a firm belief in the efficacy of raisins.

The next afternoon the Twins rode into Rowington and bought a pound of
raisins at the leading grocer's. They might well have bought them at
Little Deeping, encouraging local enterprise; but they thought
Rowington safer. They always took every possible precaution at the
beginning of an enterprise. They did not ride straight home. Three
miles out of Rowington was a small clump of trees on a hill. At the
foot of the hill, a hundred yards below the clump, lay Great Deeping
wood, acre upon acre. It had lately passed, along with the rest of the
Great Deeping estate, into the hands of Mr. D'Arcy Rosenheimer, a
pudding-faced, but stanch young Briton of the old Pomeranian strain.
He was not loved in the county, even by landed proprietors of less
modern stocks, for, though he cherished the laudable ambition of having
the finest pheasant shoot in England, and was on the way to realize it,
he did not invite his neighbors to help shoot them. His friends came
wholly from The Polite World which so adorns the illustrated weeklies.

It was in the deep December dusk that the Twins' came to the clump on
the hill. The Terror lifted their bicycles over the gate and set them
behind the hedge. He removed the pound of raisins from his bicycle
basket to his pocket, and leaving Erebus to keep watch, he stole down
the hedge to the clump, crawled through a gap into it, and walked
through it. One pheasant scuttled out of it, down the hedgerow to the
wood below. The occurrence pleased him. He crawled out of the clump
on the farther side, and proceeded to lay a train of raisins down the
ditch of the hedge to the wood. He did not lay it right down to the
wood lest some inquisitive gamekeeper might espy it. Then he returned
with fine, red Indian caution to Erebus. They rode home well content.

Next evening, with another bag of raisins, they sought the clump again.
Again the Terror laid a trail of raisins along the ditch from the wood
to the clump. But