he
old way. Some of them were poor enough; but some were good. Dick, the
cow-man, whom we had long suspected of poaching, exposed himself very
sadly, when the ale was in him, by relating a number of poaching tricks
I had never heard before. One was of how to catch stares, or shepsters,
when they fly up and down, as they do before lodging in a thicket. Then
you must turn out, said Dick, a quick stare with a limed thread of three
yards long, when she will fly straight to the rest, and, flocking among
them, will infallibly bring down at least one or two, and perhaps five
or six, all entangled in her thread. And another was how to take wild
ducks. Go into the water, said he, up to the neck, with a pumpkin put
over your head, and whilst the ducks come up to eat the seeds, you may
take them by the legs and pull them under quietly, one by one, till they
be drowned. But I would not like to do that in cold weather; and indeed
it seems to me altogether like that other method by which you take larks
by a-putting of salt upon their tails. I asked Dick, very serious,
whether he had tried that plan; and he said he had not, but that a
friend had told him of it; and the company became very merry.

There were other tales too, more grave than these, of sacrilege, and
suchlike. One, which my man James told, was of a man who took an altar
stone from an old church, to press cheeses with; but the cheeses ran
blood; so they took it from that and put it in the laundry to bat the
linen on. But at night, such a sound of batting was heard continually
from the laundry--and no one there--that the man took it back again to
the church, and buried it in the churchyard. And another was of two men
who had thrown down a village-cross upon a bowling-green; and when one
of them next day tried to move it from there, for the playing--he being
a very strong man, and lifting it on end--it fell upon him, backwards,
and crushed his breast, so that he never spoke again. And there were
many tales told of church-lands; and how my Lord Strafford, that was
beheaded, before his death told his son to get rid of them all, for that
they brought a curse always upon them that held them. And there was
another story told at the end by a man from the farm who had been in
London at the time, and had seen it for himself--how my Lords
Castlehaven and Arran, in St. James' Park, did, for a wager, kill a
strong buck in His Majesty's presence, by running on foot, and each with
a kni