It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.
"Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!" He fell thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked.

Two of Westall's best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in November!--and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say "Jack Robinson." Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds.
There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the hollow--they had been kept for the last shoot in January.

Hang him! why wasn't that fellow up to time?
But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack across his shoulders.

As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink.

Mists of Celtic melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him.