By JAMES TURVES.

It is somewhat surprising that none of our present-day novelists, like Charles Reade or Thomas Hardy, who are always on the outlook for romantic realism, whether it be in incident or in fact, have had their eyes directed to the rural poachers who abound in every shire. Poachers, though neither quite respectable members of the church nor of society, are more interesting characters than burglars or ticket-of-leave men, who figure frequently in the novelist’s pages. And, very strange to say, it has been left to a lady to write the first accounts of poaching episodes, episodes remarkable for their masculine touches and their wonderful grip of open-air reality; Harriet Martineau, in her “Forest and Game Law Tales,” astonishes us by her graphic realism and her delicacy of treatment; Charles Kingsley wrote one or two of his pathetic ballads on the subject of a poacher and his wife; Norman Macleod made a Highland poacher the subject of a character sketch; and in our own times Mr. Richard Jefferies, a writer who finds pleasure in minute description and vivid realism, has in his own style of exact word-painting given us a pleasant book about his own experiences as an amateur poacher. But the real poacher, the rural vagabond, the parish character, the ne’er-do-weel, whose life is a living protest against the game-laws, is of more lasting interest than any amateur can ever be.

Viewed from the serene vantage-ground of the philosophy of life, poaching is mean and ignoble, and demoralizing sport to you or me, and is not worth the powder and shot, while the fines and punishments are out of all proportion to the joys; yet there are not wanting apologists for it in this apologetic century. “Poaching! Man, there’s no sin in catching a rabbit or snaring a hare. They belong to naebody. Bless you! it’s a gentleman’s trick, shooting.” This is the opinion of any Northern lowland ploughman’s wife, as she looks from her red-tiled cottage-door out upon the face of the corn-growing mother earth, which has given her sweet memories and a host of country neighbors and friends.

Sixty years ago peasants could use their guns without let or hindrance, and it was then a common thing for a farm-laborer to go out and have a shot when no sportsman was in the way. Taking an odd shot now and then was never, and is not even now, looked upon by them as poaching. But a noted poacher, nicknamed the Otter, tells me, with a sigh, “Poaching is not what it once was!” And it is true. Not so very long ago it was a very profitable occupation, and comparatively respectable, before railways and telegraph wires and penny newspapers stereotyped metropolitan ideas into all and sundry. An old farmer is pointed out as having made all his money by systematic poaching, and an influential city official is said to have laid his early nest-egg by no other means than being a good shot where he had no invitation to be. To-day even rural society would look down upon a young farmer engaged in poaching. It is no longer sport to gentlemen, says the Otter, and is left to moral vagabonds, the waifs and strays, the parish loafers. The great strides of agriculture, the game-laws, and the artificial breeding of game have driven it into sneaking ways, and robbed it of its robust picturesque adventures. To excel in it a man must give up his nights and days to it—in short, he must become a specialist, and even then it hardly pays.

A genuine poacher has great force of character; he has a genius for field and woodcraft. He is the eldest survivor of rustic romance. His wild life is tinged with the love of adventure, the love of moon and stars, the knowledge of the seasons, the haunts and habits of game, and the power of trapping rabbits in dark woodland glades. No man knows more intimately the night-side of Nature between the chilly hours of midnight and sunrise. In this cold-blooded age there are always some Quixotic individuals, born in the outwardly sleepy villages and lifeless farmsteads, with the love of midnight adventure, who wage long warfare against the game-laws, and who only knuckle under to the law’s severity when their health gives way or an enemy turns informer. “Rheumatics plays the mischief with poaching!” exclaims the Otter, referring to the long night-watches in wet ditches and beside hedges for hares on the lea fields. Irrespective of all thought of gain, there is an infatuation to eager spirits in this midnight sport. It appeals to strong, healthy, brave men. Charles Kingsley, in “The Bad Squire,” with its strong sympathy and feeling, and its cry of “blood” on all the squire owned, from the foreign shrub to the game he sold, gives us the poacher’s wife view, a view we are too apt to ignore or forget, with the weary eyes and heavy heart, that grow light only with weeping, and go wandering into the night. We forget too often that in the hearts of common folk there is the glamor of poetic romance about poaching, and a bitter hatred toward the game-laws. Like Rizpah’s son, many a lad has had no other incentive than that “The farmer dared us to do it,” and that he found it sweetened by the secret sympathy of the people. Too often, I fear, the game-laws dare a brave rustic into poaching: he has only this one way left to satisfy the insatiable British thirst for field sport. It is gravely whispered that some of the most striking men have tasted its romance; and if all stories be true, the master of the English drama owes to an unlucky deer-poaching incident the lucky turn in his career which sent him to London and to writing plays, and poachers may reasonably claim Shakspere as their patron saint.

When the strong, sweet ale warms his heart, the poacher boasts of dreadful adventures in the night, of leaping broad mill-dams when chased, of giving fight in the dark, and discomfiting gamekeepers by clever tricks. He paints his exploits in such heroical glory, that the seat next the fire in the ale-house is given him by admiring and fearing rustics. Honesty he ascribes to practicedness in the world’s ways, and he looks upon keeping out of jail as the greatest victory that man can achieve. He is the type of man that makes our best soldiers, or, as he phrases it, is paid to stop the gun-shots. He requires no almanac to tell him when the moon is to rise to-morrow, and he could give the gamekeepers lessons. He is to be envied for his quick feeling of life and his sympathy for field and forest sport, and that wild exuberance of spirits which he seems to catch with his hares. It is this rural vagabond—and not Mr. Commonplace Respectability—who rivets young folks’ attention; his energy anywhere would achieve success; and he is free from that unpardonable fault, dulness. In the rustic drama of life he is the character that takes hold of us in our best impulses—and is not that the best world of the ideal? He disdains to shoot starlings or black-birds; he is too much a sportsman to pay attention to such small game. He can put his hands to various ways of living; he can collect bird’s eggs, shoot wild rock-pigeons for a farmers’ club, gather blackberries, or, as they say in Scotland, “brambles,” pull young ash-saplings in plantations, and sell them to grooms in the livery stables in town.—The Contemporary Review.