" KEEPERS " AND TRAPS.
It is remarkable, and it is a good sign, that some of the best criticism on the inhumanity of trapping comes from keepers. " Keeper " seems to some a satirical title for men whose profession is in large measure the art of destruction ; but just as Richard Jefferies emerged from sportsman into mystic, from The Gamekeeper at Home, to The Story of Mg Heart, so many keepers grow progressively more and more fond of the natural history of the woods. They reduce the size and variety of their " larders " (where no longer the barn owl and the kestrel are hung) and accumulate instead a store of sympathetic observation. This by way of preface to a criticism of the steel trap received from a keeper, whose life is spent in singularly lovely surroundings, whose letter is forwarded by a landowner from one of the most charming of old English villages.
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