gale in her own month of May, is Jack Hatch. And the indefatigable learner of the bassoon, whose drone all last harvest might be heard in the twilight issuing from the sexton’s dwelling on the Little Lea, “making night hideous,” that iniquitous practiser is Jack Hatch.
The name meets me in all manner of ways. I have seen it in the newspaper for a prize of pinks, and on the back of a warrant on a charge of poaching. [N. B.—The constable had my luck, and could not find the culprit; otherwise I might have had some chance of seeing him on that occasion.] Things the most remote and discrepant issue in Jack Hatch: he caught Dame Wheeler’s squirrel; the magpie at the Rose owes to him the half dozen phrases with which he astounds and delights the passers-by; the very dog Tero—an animal of singular habits, who sojourns occasionally at half the houses in the village, making each his home till he is affronted—Tero himself, best and ugliest of finders, a mongrel, someway compounded of terrier, cur, and spaniel—Tero, most remarkable of ugly dogs, inasmuch as he constantly squints, and, commonly goes on three legs, holding up first one and then the other, out of a sort of quadrupedal economy, to ease those useful members—Tero himself is said to belong of right and origin to Jack Hatch.
Every where that name meets me. ’Twas but
