of action in a new line of life, and would
timidly have preferred a little more privation
to any exertion for which she feared she was
unfitted. However, when she saw my father
was bent upon it, she sighed, and said she
would try; and if she did not do well, of
course she might give it up. One good thing
about it was, she did not think men ever
bought tea; and it was of men particularly
she was afraid. They had such sharp loud
ways with them; and did up accounts, and
counted their change so quickly! Now, if
she might only sell comfits to children, she
was sure she could please them!

           BAVARIAN POACHERS.

THERE is reason to doubt whether in
England the game laws are worth the
murders they provoke. Rather, we should say,
there is great reason to know that they are
not. Lately there has come into our hands
a book on Chamois hunting in the mountains
of Bavaria, suggesting, to our minds a notion
of the spirit aroused by the game laws more
than usually shocking. The book is a good
one, written by a keen sportsman upon
the subject of the finest kind of sport in
Europe. It gives a vigorous and graphic
picture of mountain life. We have
entered into it with hearty interest, and come
out of it with a belief that chamois hunting
is in its way a worthy occupation of the
energies of man. Throughout the book we
have been distressed, however, by the faithful
outline it sketches of the demoralisation that
has been effected by the game laws in
Bavaria. The author, giving a candid
account of what he found, and hating poachers
with a sportsman's bitterness, crowds tale
upon tale, apparently unconscious of the
force with which they tell against his desire
for a more complete preservation of game.
It was his intention, he says, "to the best
of his ability to give a plain, faithful picture
of what he saw, and to tell what sort
of people these mountaineers, and poachers,
and foresters are, and show how they feel
inclined towards each other." And he adds,
"As to a forester feeling anything like human
kindness for a poacher, this is demanding more
than his sinful, mortal nature is capable of.
But he has plenty of human hate to give him;
—inveterate, deep and unquenchable."

The author attributes a great deal of mischief
to the concession to the people of rights
of shooting on the open mountains, and to the
general relaxation of the ancient game laws
after the late revolution. We are of opinion,
and it requires no sagacity to come to such a
judgment, that if there never had been any
denial of a right like that—if there never had
been game laws there would have been no
gamekeepers or poachers, and so there would
have been no "hate, inveterate, deep and
unquenchable," called into play between men
living in the neighbourhood one of another.
If the right of indulging in the sport of
chamois hunting be so precious that it is
justifiable to shoot down, in cold blood, men
whose acts mar the enjoyment of it, really it
is not to be wondered at that peasants step
over an arbitrary law to come at their share
of a sport that is so fascinating. Where
then is the rascality of poaching? We speak
as Bavarians.

Without protection what would have become
of the chamois? Says the sportsman, it
would certainly have been extinguished in
Bavaria. See what havoc has been made
already by the peasants since the revolution.
No argument whatever can be drawn from
the reaction that takes place after the
removal of any restrictions by which men have
been fretted and excited into passion. We
believe that in any country, absolutely and
habitually free from game-laws, whatever
animals it might become the interest of all
men to maintain upon their lands, either for
use or pleasure, would be preserved by common
consent and usage in a sufficient manner.
The very lowest tribes of our race, who
subsist upon the kangaroo, control their
passions and their appetites so far as to have
established, among themselves, a code of
honour by which all waste hunting and
waste eating is prevented. We believe that
the Bavarian mountaineers would have kept
very good guard together for the maintenance
of their own hardy sports; but if they had
not—if they had killed every deer and chamois
in the land—it would have mattered little in
comparison with such a string of tales as
these which follow, all begotten of the laws
by which it was intended to preserve them
for the sole pleasure of licensed sportsmen:—

Meier, the forester stationed at Gmund, on
the Tegern See, hearing the crack of a rifle on
the Gschwenter Berg, followed the sound, and
found a poacher standing over a dead stag.
He seized the man and carried him off
prisoner to Miesbach, in a light cart driven
by a boy. On the way the poacher contrived,
though his hands were bound, to push the
boy out of the cart, seize the reins, and set
off down hill at full speed. Meier levelled
his rifle and shot him through the middle of
the back. The man rolled dead out of the
cart. Within two years after this occurrence
Meier and two of his companions were beaten
and left for dead by poachers. Meier was
killed. One of the men, Fuchs, recovering a
little, went, bruised and bleeding, to tell
Meier's wife that her husband lay dead in
the wood. The change from the cold air
without to the warm fireside overpowered
him, and he had scarcely told his tale when
he himself fell forward and lay as a corpse
upon the widow's hearth.

We quote verbally from the book a brief
scrap of the small talk of two gamekeepers,
the author telling us that his dialogues are
not fictitious, but real transcripts of
conversation on the mountains: