Off the Beaten Track. THE SILENCER. YOUNG FOWLEY stood looking out over the winking, cold flats, over the blaze of the setting sun, over the steely pools, over the snaky channel, toward the wild, lone, weirdly crying wild-fowl, and the blue-gray haze above the marshes touched with rose from that faintly pink sky that betokens frost. A smudge that was wild-duck slid down out of the haze, and a wedge of geese went 'honking' across. Food! Yes, food-but not for him. A year ago he could have taken his gun and shot 'two couple o' duck,' or, if the weather was hard enough, Old Fowley's punt, with the huge, ten-foot swivel-gun at bow, and, with a little luck and not a little risk, have bagged ten or twenty fat widgeon. And these he could have sold for money; and money was rent; money was clothes; money was food; money was Old Fowley saved from the terror of the workhouse; money was— A Kate! But now he could not touch a bird; he must not fire a shot. He could see, but could not take. It was the law. The new lord of the manor, a cousin of the old lord, and a commercial man from elsewhere, knowing nothing of local conditions, and caring less, had asserted his right to the foreshore, and his lawyer and his money were at the back of him. This meant that all shooting by the people, either above or below high-water mark, was stopped. It was nothing to him, of course. He had only claimed his own. Before that the people had looked upon it as their ancient right to shoot anywhere below high-water mark, on the ground that the foreshore belonged to the Crown. He had declared them wrong. Το many of the local marshmen the wild-fowling season in the winter ranked as their harvest. Wild-fowling was their calling, as it had been the calling of their fathers before them. Take it away, and they would starve. Taken away, then, it was, and the few that were still left, the remnant of a dying race, were starving in silence. They were too proud to ask. Moreover, it seemed that poaching was out of the question, for the sound of a gun carries far over those silent, wet solitudes, and the |