He wondered what they wanted.
Apparently, they were merely in a gregarious mood, yearning for the society of their fellow creatures; but in about three minutes the talk was running on pheasants.

Mr.Carrington did not like pheasants, except from the point of view of eating; and he dwelt at length on the devastation the sacred bird was working in the English countryside: villages were being emptied and let fall to ruin that it might live undisturbed; the song-birds were being killed off to give it the woods to itself.
It seemed but a natural step from the pheasant to the poacher; he was not aware that he took it at the prompting of the Terror; and he bewailed the degeneracy of the British rustic, his slow reversion to the type of neolithic man, owing to the fact that the towns drained the villages of all the intelligent.

The skilful poacher who harried the sacred bird was fast becoming extinct.
Then, at last, he came to the important matter of the wiles of the poacher; and the thirsty ears of the Terror drank in his golden words.
He discussed the methods of the gang of poachers and the single poacher with intelligent relish and more sympathy than was perhaps wise to display in the presence of the young.

The Terror came from that talk with a firm belief in the efficacy of raisins.
The next afternoon the Twins rode into Rowington and bought a pound of raisins at the leading grocer's.

They might well have bought them at Little Deeping, encouraging local enterprise; but they thought Rowington safer.