3-077-717 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

An Old Offender, 1890. 'The romance of English rural life, as well in its more innocent and idyllic phases as in the adventurous rascality to which poaching had inevitably degraded in the last generation, seems now to be faded; and we believe that not much popular sympathy is wasted on the fate sure to overtake those idle fellows, no longer bound apprentice to farmers in Somersetshire or elsewhere, who formerly made it their "delight, on a shiny night, in the season of the year." Rearing pheasants, in the modern fashion, costs a great deal of money: and the furtive killing and stealing of those pampered birds is regarded by honest folk as downright robbery, no less than the theft of barn-fowl in an enclosed farmyard. This midnight marauder, whom our Artist has depicted warily, but for once too rashly, groping his way through the Squire's woods, in pursuit of game which is certainly not his property, and who is "an old offender" of that dangerous class, deserves legal punishment, and is about to get his deserts'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.