The above lines of Cowper’s exactly, describe the keeper’s Irish terrier; the dog was almost as deep and mysterious as the man himself.  When in the woods, Tom’s attitude and gait would at times resemble the movements of a cock pheasant:  now stealing along for a few yards, listening for the slightest sound of any animal stirring in the underwood; now standing on tiptoe for a time, with bated breath.  Did a blackbird—­that dusky sentinel of the woods—­utter her characteristic note of warning, he would whisper, “Hark!” Then, after due deliberation, he would add, “’Tis a fox!” or, “There’s a fox in the grove,” and then he would steal gently up to try to get a glimpse of reynard.  He never looked more natural than when carrying seven or eight brace of partridges, four or five hares, and a lease of pheasants; it was a labour of love to him to carry such a load back to the village after a day’s shooting.  In his pockets alone he could stow away more game than most men can conveniently carry on their backs.

He was the best hand at catching trout the country could produce.  With a rod and line he could pull them out on days when nobody else could get a “rise.”  He could not understand dry-fly fishing, always using the old-fashioned sunk fly.  “Muddling work,” he used to call the floating method of fly fishing.

But Tom Peregrine was cleverer with the landing-net than with the rod.  Any trout he could reach with the net was promptly pulled out, if we particularly wanted a fish.  Then he would talk all day about any subject under the sun:  politics, art, Roman antiquities, literature, and every form of sport were discussed with equal facility.

One day, when I was engaged in a slight controversy with his own father, the keeper said to me:  “I shouldn’t take any notice whatever of him”; then he added, with a sigh, “These Gloucestershire folk are comical people.”

“Ah! ’tis a wise son that knows his own father in Gloucestershire, isn’t it, Peregrine?” said I, putting the Shakespearian cart before the horse.

“Yes, it be, to be sure, to be sure,” was the reply.  “I can’t make ’em out nohow; they’re funny folk in Gloucestershire.”

He gave me the following account of the “chopping” of one of our foxes:  “I knew there was a fox in the grove; and there, sure enough, he was.  But when he went toward the ‘bruk,’ the hounds come along and give him the meeting; and then they bowled him over.  It were a very comical job; I never see such a job in all my life.  I knew it would be a case,” he added, with a chuckle.

The fact is, with that deadly aversion to all the vulpine race common to all keepers, he dearly loved to see a fox killed, no matter how or where; but to see one “chopped,” without any of that “muddling round and messing about,” as he delighted to call a hunting run, seemed to him the very acme of satisfaction and despatch.