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Upon the chivalrous, bold, and courageous achievement of a so valiant, stout, and manlike act, the other mole-catching symmysts have been so highly incensed, and have so chafed, fretted, and fumed thereat, that, bills of complaint and accusations having been in a most odious and detestable manner put in before the competent judges, the arm of secular authority hath with much importunity and impetuosity been by them implored and required, they proudly contending that the servants of God would become contemptible if exemplary punishment were not speedily taken upon the persons of the perpetrators of such an enormous, horrid, sacrilegious, crying, heinous, and execrable crime.

After breakfast she went out into the fields. Old Halsey was mole-catching in one of them. But instead of going to inspect him and his results, she slipped through a tall hedge, and paced the road under its shelter, looking for Dempsey. On the stroke of eleven she saw him in the distance. He came up with the same look, half embarrassed, half inclining to laugh, that he had worn the day before.

All this Jem swore he had seen, more by token that it was the very day he had been mole-catching on Squire Cass's land, down by the old saw-pit. Some said Marner must have been in a "fit", a word which seemed to explain things otherwise incredible; but the argumentative Mr. Macey, clerk of the parish, shook his head, and asked if anybody was ever known to go off in a fit and not fall down.

"To John Harborough's cottage at the other end of the hill," answered Bent. "He's the man they spoke of in there. He's a queer character a professional pig-killer, who has other trades as well. He does a bit of rat-catching, and a bit of mole-catching and a good deal of poaching. In fact, he's an odd person altogether, not only in character but in appearance.

For in my time there hath been found on the continent a certain country, wherein are I know not what kind of Pastophorian mole-catching priests, who, albeit averse from engaging their proper persons into a matrimonial duty, like the pontifical flamens of Cybele in Phrygia, as if they were capons, and not cocks full of lasciviousness, salacity, and wantonness, who yet have, nevertheless, in the matter of conjugal affairs, taken upon them to prescribe laws and ordinances to married folks.

Nevertheless, by those wicked laws and mole-catching customs, whereat there is a little hinted in what I have already spoken to you, there is no scurvy, measly, leprous, or pocky ruffian, pander, knave, rogue, skellum, robber, or thief, pilloried, whipped, and burn-marked in his own country for his crimes and felonies, who may not violently snatch away and ravish what maid soever he had a mind to pitch upon, how noble, how fair, how rich, honest, and chaste soever she be, and that out of the house of her own father, in his own presence, from the bosom of her mother, and in the sight and despite of her friends and kindred looking on a so woeful spectacle, provided that the rascal villain be so cunning as to associate unto himself some mystical flamen, who, according to the covenant made betwixt them two, shall be in hope some day to participate of the prey.

He will not seek the destruction of any quarry that is not worthy of his steel; he likes to go against that quarry where there are obstacles and dangers for him, and opportunities of escape for the creature he pursues. He is a sportsman, not a butcher; mole-catching never stirred the blood in his veins. And while he is hunting animals he is educating himself as a scout.