's house. He found Mr.
Carrington uncommonly bitter against his client; and he did his best to
placate him by urging that the assault had been met with a promptitude
which had robbed it of its violence, and that he could well afford to
be generous to a man whom he had so neatly put to sleep with an
uppercut on the point.

Mr. Carrington held out for a while; but in the background, behind the
more prominent figures in the affair, lurked the Terror with a
veritable poached pheasant; and at last he made terms. The summonses
should be withdrawn on condition that nothing more was heard about that
poached pheasant and that Mr. D'Arcy Rosenheimer contributed fifty
guineas to the funds of the Deeping Cottage Hospital. The lawyer
accepted the terms readily; and his client made no objection to
complying with them.

The matter was at an end by noon of the next day; and Mr. Carrington
sent for the Terror and talked to him very seriously about this
poaching. He did not profess to consider it an enormity; he dwelt at
length on the extreme annoyance his mother would feel if he were caught
and prosecuted. In the end he gave him the choice of giving his word
to snare no more pheasants, or of having his mother informed that he
was poaching. The Terror gave his word to snare no more pheasants the
more readily since if Mrs. Dangerfield were informed of his poaching,
she would forbid him to set another snare for anything. Besides, he
had been somewhat shaken by his narrow escape the day before. Only he
pointed out that he could not be quite sure of never snaring a
pheasant, for pheasants went everywhere. Mr. Carrington admitted this
fact and said that it would be enough if he refrained from setting his
snares on ground sacred to the sacred bird. If pheasants wandered into
them on unpreserved ground, it was their own fault. Thanks therefore
to the firmness of her friends Mrs. Dangerfield never learned of the
Terror's narrow escape.

The Twins bore the loss of income from the sacred bird with even minds,
since the sum needed for the fur stole was so nearly complete. They
turned their attention to the habits of the hare, and snared one in the
hedge of the farthest meadow of farmer Stubbs. Mrs. Blenkinsop's cook
paid them half-a-crown for it; and the three guineas were complete.

Though it wanted a full week to Christmas, the Terror lost no time
making the purchase. As he told Erebus, they would get the choice of
more stoles