104 THE PHEASANT. 
to the successful propagation of the pheasant. This 
bird has a capacious stomach, and requires much 
nutriment; while its timidity soon causes it to 
abandon those places which are disturbed. It is 
fond of acorns, beech mast, the berries of the haw- 
thorn, the seeds of the wild rose, and the tubers of 
the Jerusalem artichoke. As long as these, and 
the corn dropped in the harvest, can be procured, 
the pheasant will do very well. In the spring it 
finds abundance of nourishment in the sprouting 
leaves of young clover; but, from the commence- 
ment 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 usu- 
ally 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 
