d**k JOPLING had long been in the service of the late Mr. Lacey as a gamekeeper. He was a widower with two grown- up sons and a daughter. One son was in the army, another in the navy, while Martha, a well-proportioned young woman of twenty or thereabouts, presided over her father’s small household. d**k himself had been a soldier; had seen service, been seriously wounded, and dismissed with a trifling pension. He was a native of Ministerfield, and so it came about that he entered the service of Mr. Lacey, and occupied a picturesque little cottage on the edge of the Black Lake Wood. As a gamekeeper he was a useful man, being thoroughly versed in woodcraft, and there was little in connection with feather and fur that he did not understand. He was an authority on the wild life of the woods, a
