“Make haste, then, and see the last of these doomed institutions” observed Mr. Quirk, with dark significance, as he looked up from his steak and onions.  “I tell you deer-forests are doomed; grouse-moors are doomed; salmon-rivers are doomed.  They are a survival of feudal rights and privileges which the new democracy—­the new ruling power—­will make short work of.  The time has gone by for all these absurd restrictions and reservations!  There is no defence for them; there never was; they were conceived in an iniquity of logic which modern common-sense will no longer suffer. Bona vacantia can’t belong to anybody—­therefore they belong to the king; that’s a pretty piece of reasoning, isn’t it?  And if the crofter or the laborer says, ’Bona vacantia can’t belong to anybody—­therefore they belong to me’—­isn’t the reasoning as good?  But it is not merely game-laws that must be abolished, it is game itself.”

“If you abolish the one, you’ll soon get rid of the other,” Maurice Mangan said, with a kind of half-contemptuous indifference; he was examining this person in a curious way, as he might have looked through the wires of a cage in the Zoological Gardens.

“Both must be abolished,” Mr. Octavius Quirk continued, with windy vehemence.  “The very distinction that takes any animal ferae naturae and constitutes it game is a relic of class privilege and must go—­”

“Then Irish landlords will no longer be considered ferae naturae?” Mangan asked, incidentally.

“We must be free from these feudal tyrannies, these mediaeval chains and manacles that the Norman kings imposed on a conquered people.  We must be as free as the United States of America—­”

“America!” Mangan said; and he was rude enough to laugh.  “The State of New York has more stringent game-laws than any European country that I know of; and why not?  They wanted to preserve certain wild animals, for the general good; and they took the only possible way.”

Quirk was disconcerted only for a moment; presently he had resumed, in his reckless, mouton-enrage fashion,

“That may be; but the Democracy of Great Britain has pronounced against game; and game must go; there is no disputing the fact.  Hunting in any civilized community is a relic of barbarism; it is worse in this country—­it is an infringement of the natural rights of the tiller of the soil.  What is the use of talking about it?—­the whole thing is doomed; if you’re going to Scotland this autumn, Mr. Moore, if you are to be shown all those exclusive pastimes of the rich and privileged classes, well, I’d advise you to keep your eyes open, and write as clear an account of what you see as you can; and, by Jove, twenty years hence your book will be read with amazement by the new generation!”

Here the pot of foaming stout claimed his attention; he buried his head in it; and thereafter, sitting back in his chair, sighed forth his satisfaction.  The time was come for a large cigar.