gentlemen lost a fish with their clumsiness--Oh, Father! to hear 'em
let out at me and my landing-net, and curse fit to fright the devil!
Dash their sarcy tongues! Eh! Don't old Harry know their ways?
Don't he know 'em, now?'

'Ay,' said the young man, bitterly. 'We break the dogs, and we load
the guns, and we find the game, and mark the game,--and then they
call themselves sportsmen; we choose the flies, and we bait the
spinning-hooks, and we show them where the fish lie, and then when
they've hooked them, they can't get them out without us and the
spoonnet; and then they go home to the ladies and boast of the lot
of fish they killed--and who thinks of the keeper?'

'Oh! ah! Then don't say old Harry knows nothing, then. How nicely,
now, you and I might get a living off this 'ere manor, if the
landlords was served like the French ones was. Eh, Paul?' chuckled
old Harry. 'Wouldn't we pay our taxes with pheasants and grayling,
that's all, eh? Ain't old Harry right now, eh?'

The old fox was fishing for an assent, not for its own sake, for he
was a fierce Tory, and would have stood up to be shot at any day,
not only for his master's sake, but for the sake of a single
pheasant of his master's; but he hated Tregarva for many reasons,
and was daily on the watch to entrap him on some of his peculiar
points, whereof he had, as we shall find, a good many.

What would have been Tregarva's answer, I cannot tell; but Lancelot,
who had unintentionally overheard the greater part of the
conversation, disliked being any longer a listener, and came close
to them.