278 WILD FOWL SHOOTING. 
Through the rough, dark months of winter, in what sunny clime, 
*Mid green lagoons and savannahs, passed ye the delicious time ? 
Haply amid verdurous islands where the Mexic billows smile, 
*Mid sweet flower-glades and gay plumage ye would riot all the 
while; 
Haply amid red flamingoes, hovering o’er some lilied lake, 
Where the aloe drops its branches and the palms their branches 
shake. 
IsAAc MCLELLAN. 
THE wild goose is so familiar to nearly every citizen 
of the United States, that it seems quite superfluous to 
call public attention to it scientifically and historically, 
except in a casual manner. Those great ornithologists 
Audubon and Wilson, besides others have treated of it 
so exhaustively, that, combined with the practical ob- 
servation the reader may have had, it may possibly be 
“Joyve’s labor lost” with many, for me to describe its 
habits, resorts, peculiarities and breeding places. 
Their ancestry. their origin, when and where first 
discovered, dates back, one might say, “ to a time when 
the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” 
There is no time in the history of the world that we 
can trace back, and find them unknown. In England 
they were seen and known hundreds of years ago. 
Acclimated and domesticated in Ancient Rome, they 
served as sentinels to warn the sleeping inhabitants of 
that city of the enemy’s approach, which event occurred 
soon after the Eternal City had been furrowed out by 
Romulus and Remus; and to go still further back, to 
pre-historic times—to a time when Noah, according to 
Divine instruction, had filled the Ark with two of 
every living kind, we can imagine a pair of these geese 
a trifle late to gain entrance through the sealed doors 
of the ark, swimming round and round the vessel, nois- 
ily clamoring for admission. 
