112 AMEKICAN GAME BIKD SHOOTING. 



remainder of the pack sought safer quarters. They had 

 no sooner started, however, than the terrier pursued 

 them, and kept barking all the way until he got beyond 

 our hearing. 



Picking up the dead birds, we went after the dog, as 

 we knew he Avould not stop until he flushed another 

 brood or saw those started alight, but we had not pro- 

 ceeded fifty yards before we came upon a mother and her 

 nearly full-grown brood. We tried to make them rise by 

 firing sticks and stones at them, but our efforts proved 

 unavailing, for they kept running ahead of us and cluck- 

 ing occasionally, or trying to hide in the undergrowth. 

 We finally dashed in among them, and, flushing them, 

 fired a volley, which gave us two brace and a half. Hav- 

 ing shouldered the birds, we trudged onward through 

 masses of matted briers, broken branches, and fallen 

 leaves, which seemed to be far more numerous than ever 

 they were at Vallambrosa, until we came to a beautiful 

 meadow, which was covered with a most luxuriant 

 growth of grass and wild flowers, and surrounded by gigan- 

 tic firs and spruces, so that it resembled an artificial park. 

 In looking over this, we obtained a vista of the Pacific 

 Ocean through a magnificent avenue of trees, and could 

 hear its rumbling and hissing as the huge billows surged 

 shoreward, and its dirge-like cadence as they slowly re- 

 ceded. The air was as still as that of a picture, and the 

 only sounds that disturbed the awful silence of the forest 

 were the scolding, croaking chatter of the blue jay, which 

 resented our intrusion on its sacred ground, and the soft 

 notes of that little woodland rambler, the peewee, which 

 seems attached to the humid depths of the woods, where 

 its only feathered companions are the grouse and an oc- 

 casional hawk. 



The scene was so fair and yet so majestic, that we for- 

 got all about our mission, and gazed in silent rapture 

 upon the beauty spread before us. While we were lost 



