3-077-718 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Trapped!, 1890. '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. The Squire, attended by a valiant gamekeeper, has watched him entering the wood; in another moment, the keeper has grappled him from behind, and his gun goes off in the struggle, firing harmlessly in the air. We are not sorry that he is "trapped" at last, but we should like to hope that a brief imprisonment will teach him to renounce these wrongful tricks, and that he will eventually find his way to some new country - Australia, for instance, or New Zealand - where at least he may shoot thousands of rabbits, and be handsomely rewarded for doing such useful service: or to the backwoods of Canada, which abound in free wild game'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.