Were the inventors of automatic machines to be ranged according to the
excellence of their devices for producing sound artistic 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
specimen. 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 onward down to the third decade of the nineteenth
century, this model had borne the palm, and had been most usually
followed when the orchards and estates required new ones.

There had been the toothless variety used by the softer-hearted
landlords--quite contemptible in their clemency. The jaws 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 squires, or those under the
influence of their wives: two inches of mercy, two inches of cruelty,
two inches of mere 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.