broken leg, and had deliberately put it into 

 a clay cast to hold the broken bones in place 

 ^4 Woodcock. unt ii they should knit together again; but 

 naturally I kept my own counsel, knowing 

 that no one would believe in the theory. 

 For years I questioned gunners closely, and 

 found two who said that they had killed 

 woodcock whose legs had at one time been 

 broken and had healed again. As far as 

 they could remember, the leg had in each 

 case healed perfectly straight instead of twist- 

 ing out to one side, as a chicken's leg does 

 when broken and allowed to knit of itself. 

 I examined hundreds of woodcock in the 

 markets in different localities, and found one 

 whose leg had at one time been broken by a 

 shot and then had healed perfectly. There 

 were plain signs of dried mud at the break; 

 but that was also true of the other leg near 

 the foot, which only indicated that the bird 

 had been feeding in soft places. All this 

 proved nothing to an outsider, and I kept 

 silence as to what I had seen until last win- 

 ter, twenty years afterwards, when the con- 

 firmation came unexpectedly. I had been 



