THE PHEASANT. 371 



commencement of the new year till the vernal period, their wild food 

 affords a very scanty supply ; and the bird will be exposed to all the 

 evils of the Vagrant Act, unless you can contrive to keep it at home 

 by an artificial supply of food. Boiled potatoes (which the pheasant 

 prefers much to those in the raw state) and beans are, perhaps, the 

 two most nourishing things that can be offered in the depth of 

 winter. Beans, in the end, are cheaper than all the smaller kinds of 

 grain, because the little birds, which usually swarm at the place 

 where pheasants are fed, cannot swallow them ; and if you conceal 

 the beans under yew or holly bushes, or under the lower branches 

 of the spruce fir tree, they will be out of the way of the rooks and 

 ringdoves. About two roods of the thousand-headed cabbage are a 

 most valuable acquisition to the pheasant preserve. You sow a few 

 ounces of seed in April, and transplant the young plants, two feet 

 asunder, in the month of June. By the time that the harvest is all in, 

 these cabbages will afford a most excellent aliment to the pheasants, 

 and are particularly serviceable when the ground is deeply covered 

 with snow. I often think that pheasants are unintentionally de- 

 stroyed by farmers during the autumnal seed-time. They have a 

 custom of steeping the wheat in arsenic water. This must be in- 

 jurious to birds which pick up the corn remaining on the surface of 

 the mould. I sometimes find pheasants at this period dead in the 

 plantations, and now and then take them up weak and languid, and 

 quite unable to fly. I will mention here a little robbery by the 

 pheasants, which has entirely deprived me of a gratification I used 

 formerly to experience in an evening's saunter down the vale. They 

 have completely exterminated the grasshoppers. For these last 

 fourteen years I have not once heard the voice of this merry summer 

 charmer in the park. In order to render useless all attempts of the 

 nocturnal poacher to destroy the pheasants, it is absolutely necessary 

 that a place of security should be formed. I know of no position 

 more appropriate than a piece of level ground, at the bottom of a 

 hill, bordered by a gentle stream. About three acres of this, sowed 

 with whins, and surrounded with a holly fence, to keep the cattle 

 out, would be the very thing. In the centre of it, for the space of 

 one acre, there ought to be planted spruce fir trees, about fourteen 

 feet asunder. Next to the larch, this species of tree is generally 



