OUTDOOR SERVANTS.-No. I., THE GAMEKEEPER. 'BY THE GENTLEMAN IN BLACK.'

NOT every man that wears a fustian shooting jacket and leather gaiters, that carries a gun under his arm and a billycock hat on his head is a gamekeeper. The symbols and signs of authority do not always cloak the requisite powers for its confirmation; and although majesty without its externals has been facetiously termed 'a jest,' there is more truth in the saying when applied to many of our ordinary occupations. We have all of us seen, under the most sporting exterior among amateurs, an ignorance of everything connected with it, perfectly astounding; indeed I have sometimes begun to think, heterodoxically perhaps, that a very close and formal attention to externals exists in a corresponding ratio to the absence of internal qualifications; and if this be the case sometimes with the master, it need not astonish us that it is so occasionally with the man.

A really good gamekeeper is not made in a day; and the occupation is sure to have many candidates from among the poorer classes for very obvious reasons. There is the great and universal prestige in favour of sport, singularly attractive to the idle English mind. Anything connected with horses and dogs, without reference to capability for dealing with them, is sure to attract. It reveals a life full of healthful exercise; of contact with superior classes; and of a certain position. Above all things, it is pecuniarily profitable beyond wages; and holds out to the enterprising a very large field of operations in selfish interests. Of course it is desirable that this last motive should be discouraged, but it is impossible to ignore its power in bringing a vast number of improper candidates into the field.

A high-class keeper is not every man's servant, like a cook or a maid of all work; and there are consequently among the middle classes of sportsmen many very bad specimens of this out-door servant. The most ordinary requirements at first sight are physical strength and capability of endurance. He should also be a man of cool determination, great activity, and undaunted courage. It is also desirable that he should be a good shot, though this is a secondary consideration in comparison with the rest of the qualities which go to form a good keeper. A perfectly good trapper (I do not mean a buggy horse) is far better.

In disposition he should be a man of equable temper, and although taken not unfrequently from the lower or less educated classes, he should be a man of good manners, as dealing essentially with gentlemen, and that in moments when their own manner and conversation are likely to be less under restraint than usual. A keeper, such as we mean, should have a power of bearing and forbearing; for he will meet with many disappointments in showing sport, and will have to submit to criticism, sometimes unmerited, and from very ignorant critics. The less he swears the better; he will only add strength to the chorus, without improving the tune. Men, not altogether

ignorant, but zealous and jealous promoters of sport expect a great deal from their keepers: sometimes too much. They will have everything, foxes and pheasants (which, indeed, they have a right to expect), and abundance of game on all sorts of soils, and with all sorts of liberties (which they have no right to expect); and unless a man has temper to put up with these disappointments, and to make allowance for unjustifiable expectations on the part of his patrons, who will not make allowance for him, he had better turn to some other occupation than that of a gamekeeper.

These are dispositions and qualities, not duties, with which we have been dealing. We come to speak of the latter now, and in doing so to point out a mistaken idea which has prevailed, and does prevail among the numerous classes who have adopted sport rather than have been born to it. Their commonest idea of a keeper was that he should be able to shoot game; and the boast we have heard has been not unfrequently on the prowess of the keeper with his gun. Now the first duty of a keeper is to preserve game, not to destroy it. The excellence of the servant will be shown by the heads of game he can exhibit in his covers, and on his manor. And this is to be done by the destruction of vermin, and all enemies to those feræ nature which are especially under his charge.

We shall say nothing about trapping foxes, excepting this: that the keeper who has been once guilty of such a thing in a fox-hunting country should never be employed again in the same capacity; and the master who would allow a servant to do so unneighbourly an action is about on a par with the man. His ingenuity, on the other hand, may be well and fully employed against the polecat, the stoat, the weasel, and enemies of a like nature. He must literally be wide awake early in the morning to catch the weasel asleep. If he be not an early riser he is nothing at all. Knowledge too of their habits is as needful as industry; for it must not be taken for granted that they are alike in their ways. They are very different, require different traps and baits; and for their effective destruction a gamekeeper should be little short of a Red Indian.

His skill as a shot, but even more as a wood-craftsman, will be put into requisition against buzzards (if he can find one left), kites, hawks, and such wary and powerful foes. Their destruction is a paramount obligation; and it is the truest and most honourable use of craft which we can recommend for practice.

Another grand mistake in the presumed qualities of a keeper we will endeavour to rectify, while we are upon the subject. Set a thief to catch a thief,' is one of those proverbial expressions which have little truth in them when fairly examined; but it has been applied to the servant on whose character we are now employed, until it has really established itself in minds not accustomed to analyse closely the motives of action. It has been said that the greatest poacher makes the best keeper. Yes, if you can believe that a trust requiring honesty and moral courage, and the responsibilities of which are connected with property more easily disposed of

than any other, is best served by a scoundrel, regardless of morals or law, of course your best keeper will be the late leader of a desperate gang. Never was a greater absurdity; or one on which it would be more dangerous to act. Let your keeper have all knowledge of a poacher's ways, of his haunts, his companions, his resources, and his implements. It is his duty frequently to resort to methods for acquiring information which under other circumstances he might be slow to employ; he is the sporting policeman of the neighbourhood, bound to keep his eye on the rascals of the parish, and if need be to learn their manoeuvres by some means or other. But he is not bound to compromise his own character or self-respect—a quality which some are apt to think no poor man ever has-nor to act with any sort of conciliation towards a poacher. He should be his greatest enemy; and the reproach of having belonged to a gang would, in the eyes of an honest and conscientious person, go far to rob him of any character at all.

Another duty, and an equally indispensable one, is a knowledge of dogs. It is true that, with the exception of Scotland, the fashion of shooting to pointers and setters has given place to a system of walking up birds, and seeking the wounded and slaughtered with the aid of a retriever. Scotland is a noble exception. On the moors the keeper's chief pride exists in full force. There he sees his dogs work, stand, back, and down charge, as of yore. There he still feels a pleasure in showing how much may be done by his care, his temper, his knowledge, and the value of high breeding, shape, courage, and obedience in the dog himself. But in England we have less of it every day. It is true that the breaking of a retriever is a harder task than either; I at least have found it so; but there was always the magnificent exhibition of a team of dogs at work, which repaid a man for any trouble he had been at in their teaching. And not only is it the breaking of your dogs, which should form part of your keeper's occupation, but in many cases their breeding, their selection, their treatment in or out of health is entirely his own. Few men who shoot now-a-days have the taste or the time to devote to its more delicate, and, to us, more interesting details, but have enough to do to kill their game, and to arrange their battues, fully satisfied that the rest is being done for them at so much per annum, or week, as the case may be. If, in addition therefore to these qualities and employments, your keeper be a shrewd, clever man, with sufficient education to keep the accounts of the game, the outlay in feed, the number of eggs hatched under hens and brought out; to judge of the value of his underkeepers, and a good judge of character generally as to the men he employs, you will have got all you can desire, and as much as you have a right to expect; nor is there any reason why he should not have some acquaintance with the gamelaws as far as his own business is concerned; as it may save his master some trouble and expense if he ascertain beforehand his own powers of shooting other people's dogs or of taking other people's guns. This knowledge may be easily acquired, but it is not every keeper that is possessed of it.

A gamekeeper should be a sober man-(not that intemperance is a virtue in any of us)-for there is no right performance of matutinal duty if the night be spent in the village public; nor is there any fault which lays a man open so easily to the aspersions to which a keeper is always more or less liable in his own neighbourhood. In the field he should be silent, it is his greatest virtue. All teaching should have preceded his appearance with his master and his guests. That eternal shouting of 'mark' upon every occasion, as if nobody could see birds but himself, and the rating of dogs, and directions to underlings, is one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of a good servant. Eager to show his zeal, he is always making a noise; and forgets that his duty there is not only to show zeal and birds, but to bring the sportsman as near to his game as circumstances will permit. This can only be done by quiet; and when the first blush of the season is gone by, and birds have become wild, the nuisance of a talkative keeper is beyond all conception. If his master has sent him into the field to scare the birds, and to give his friend a day's shooting at as little expense of game as possible, we can conceive no means so effective for the purpose. But I have no acquaintance with friends of that kind, and am willing to believe that there are no such persons. Therefore we recommend silence as golden in a gamekeeper on beat above all things.

There are certain gun-room duties which we need not here touch upon; they have reference only to the necessity for care and cleanliness in the materials of shooting, and are the result of good places and natural good manners. They will not be found in perfection in any keepers but those who have had a good apprenticeship; and, as the increase of preservation, the number of rented manors, the scores of men who shoot, go on from year to year, so that the demand far exceeds the supply, we must do as well as we can with what we can get, and supply a little of the teaching ourselves. Nothing looks worse than to see a keeper giving his guns a final polish as the party is waiting for him to proceed. The arms should be in readiness, and the ammunition to each apportioned off, and placed in the hands of that subordinate to whom you are told off for the day.

In

The wages of keepers, as you may see from these remarks, must vary very considerably. They depend altogether on the extent of the manor, the number and extent of covers, the difficulties of the situation, and its perquisites. An ordinary keeper would receive now perhaps, for a moderate manor, about thirty shillings a week, with a comfortable cottage and some advantages of wood or coal. higher situations the wages are much higher; and the work is not unfrequently done by subordinates. We know of one large estate of a separate keeper to each beat, where the work is most admirably performed. Some considerable difference too exists in the prospect of fees, which are sufficiently heavy to make them a material consideration. This is the wrong end of our article to begin an important part of a subject. I can only assure our readers, that of all the nonsense that has appeared in the papers of late years, none has equalled that which we read last autumn on the subject of game

keepers' fees. Those letters must for the most part have been written by persons utterly unacquainted with the usual character of the men of whom they wrote, or so maliciously set upon saving their own pockets as to have meditated a crusade against a civil and hardworking class. The whole question apparently arose from a facetious picture in our Van (by that eminent farceur, the author,) of a keeper who never took anything but paper; and as it is a delightful sensation to see oneself in print (until you become thoroughly used to it, and get nothing for it), the question of gamekeepers' fees remains much where it was, and will remain there until gentlemen take to abusing a system which the lords of the soil inaugurated, and which is nearly as old as the hills, and older than the trees on and among which they shoot. That exorbitant payment is not the rule, one instance may serve to show; and if snobs with more money than brains, or with more brains than respect for the conventionalities of society, err on either side of the happy and virtuous medium, it is not fair to tax the gamekeepers with avaricious impertinence.

At one of the best houses in England, where the shooting is of the very highest class, and in which several thousand head are counted at the end of the four days, two sovereigns is considered a sufficient honorarium to the head keeper. The whole conduct of the affair, from the placing of the guns to the ordering of the beaters, is of the very highest class; and if there be one house in England above another where extreme liberality of fees might be expected to reign, that is the one. But I suppose the greatest skinflint, or the most highly-principled stickler for economy, would find fault with so fair an arrangement. If men cannot afford to do as others, the remedy is in their own hands; and having once had experience of a gentleman's gentleman who was above gold, and only dealt in paper, I should advise them to avoid so dangerous a locality for the future. As to incivility, I never have met with it, and do not believe in it. One thing at least would check that favouritism which is sure to follow a free hand and a full pocket, which is that the proprietor himself should follow the example of my friend, and place his guns himself.

THE CHRONICLES OF HEATHERTHORP.

XI. PATRICK RYAN, HORSEDEALER AND HANDICAPPER EXTRAORDINARY, WRITES MR. ESSOM A LETTER, WHICH PECULIAR DOCUMENT ELICITS SOME REMARKS OF A SWEEPING NATURE FROM THE DOCTOR AND CRISP. THEREAFTER THE CURTAIN RISES UPON WHAT THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER AFTERWARDS VERY PROPERLY, AND WITH CHARMING FRESHNESS, TERMED THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY SPORTING EVENT THAT HAD OCCURRED IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD WITHIN THE MEMORY OF THE OLDEST INHABITANT.'

THE day for the meeting on the moor drew near apace, and yet 'the indefatigable and courteous clerk of the course' (indefatigable and courteous is the phrase for a clerk of a course we believe, just