Were the inventors of automatic machines to be ranged according to the excellence¹ of their devices for producing sound artistic² torture, the creator of the man-trap would occupy a very respectable if not a very high place.

It should rather, however, be said, the inventor of the particular form of man-trap of which this found in the keeper’s out-house was a specimen³. For there were other shapes and other sizes, instruments which, if placed in a row beside one of the type disinterred by Tim, would have worn the subordinate aspect of the bears, wild boars, or wolves in a travelling menagerie, as compared with the leading lion or tiger. In short, though many varieties had been in use during those centuries which we are accustomed to look back upon as the true and only period of merry England — in the rural districts more especially — and onward⁴ down to the third decade of the nineteenth century, this model had borne the palm, and had been most usually followed when the orchards⁵ and estates required new ones.

There had been the toothless variety used by the softer-hearted landlords — quite contemptible⁶ in their clemency⁷. The jaws⁸ of these resembled the jaws of an old woman to whom time has left nothing but gums. There were also the intermediate or half-toothed sorts, probably devised by the middle-natured squires⁹, or those under the influence of their wives: two inches of mercy, two inches of cruelty, two inches of mere¹⁰ nip, two inches of probe, and so on, through the whole extent of the jaws. There were also, as a class apart, the bruisers, which did not lacerate the flesh, but only crushed the bone

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