08 WARWICK WOODLANDS. 



park full of tame birds, instead of a range, perhaps, of many 

 thousand acres, of the very wildest, barest moorland, stocked 

 with the wariest and shyest of the feathered race, the red grouse. 

 But what I mean to say, is this, that every English game-bird 

 to use an American phrase is warier and wilder than its com- 

 peer in the United States. Who, for instance, ever saw in Eng- 

 land, Ireland, or Scotland, eighteen or twenty snipe or wood- 

 cock, lying within a space of twelve yards square, two or three 

 dogs pointing in the midst of them, and the birds rising one 

 by one, the gunshots rattling over them, till ten or twelve are 

 on the ground before there is time to bag one. 



" English partridge will, I grant, do this sometimes, on very 

 warm days in September ; but let a man go out with his heavy 

 gun and steady dog late in December, or the month preceding 

 it, let him see thirty or more covies as on good ground he 

 may let him see every covey rise at a hundred yards, and fly 

 a mile ; let him be proud and glad to bag his three or four 

 brace ; and then tell me that there is any sport in these Atlan- 

 tic States so wild as English winter field-shooting. 



" Of grouse shooting on the bare hills, which, by the way, 

 are wilder, more solitary far, and more aloof from the abodes of 

 men, than any thing between Boston and the Green Bay, I do 

 not of course speak ; as it confessedly is the most wild and 

 difficult kind of shooting. 



" Still less of deer stalking for Scrope's book has been read 

 largely even here ; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can 

 compare with the standing at a deer-path all day long waiting 

 till a great timid beast is driven up within ten* yards of your 

 muzzle, with that extraordinary sport on bald and barren moun- 

 tains, where nothing but vast and muscular exertion, the eye of 

 the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can bring you within 

 range of the wild cattle of the hills. 



"Battue shooting, i grant, is tame work; but partridge 

 shooting, after the middle of October, is infinitely wilder, re- 

 quiring more exertion and more toil than quail shooting. Even 

 the pheasant the tamest of our English game is infinitely 

 bolder on the wing than the ruffed grouse, or New York part- 

 ridge ; while about snipe and woodcock there exists no com- 

 parison since by my own observation, confirmed by the opinion 

 of old sportsmen, I am convinced that nine-tenths of the snipe 

 and cock bagged in the States, are killed between fifteen and 

 twenty paces ; while I can safely say, I never saw a full snipe 



