COOKERY 275 



more delicate than those of the domestic goose. 

 The troopers went in for bird-nesting extraordinary, 

 for the nests were often in the lofty cotton trees torty 

 or fifty feet above the ground. When Audubon was 

 at St. Louis, in 1843, the market there was swamped 

 with both ducks and geese. The geese sold at ten 

 cents a-piece; the canvas-backs went at a shilling 

 a couple. And in Maryland now the celery-feeding 

 wild geese are scarcely less appreciated than the 

 canvas-back ducks. 



We have no such good luck with them in our 

 little sea-girt islands, where they come from the bleak 

 north as birds of passage, and have to forage casually 

 for a precarious livelihood. The wildest and most 

 wary of all living creatures, for stalking the red deer 

 is a joke to circumventing the greylag, their nerves 

 must be always highly strung. The lag, by the way, 

 is said to have got its name because it is the last to 

 leave us for the northern breeding grounds. Pennant 

 tells us ' it was esteemed most esculent meat,' but the 

 fact is the flesh is somewhat coarse, though not to be 

 despised after some weeks of pillage in the fresh-sown 

 corn-fields. The white-fronted goose is more com- 

 mon, though quite as shy, and, on the whole, less 

 worth eating. However the bean goose came by his 

 designation which is disputed there is no doubt 



