Fir gin Soil 17 



brute of an ox that Pete was clubbing along, in- 

 stead of going around a brush pile on the edge of 

 an old logging road, blundered through it, send- 

 ing a mother quail and her callow brood into the 

 road at their feet. The mother gave one note of 

 warning and the baby quail neither ran nor flew, 

 but simply vanished before their very eyes. The 

 small boy was sure that the ox had stepped on the 

 mother, as she was turning somersaults rather 

 than running, so he started after her like a flash, 

 and in a minute had her in his hands. Pete, con- 

 vulsed with laughter, came to meet him and ex- 

 amining the bird found she had lost the first joint 

 of every toe, they probably having been frozen 

 off. What had tickled him so much was to see 

 the fool thing trying to get them to chase her, 

 when she was so "gol-fired" lame that their slow- 

 est ox could out-run her. He then, in reply to the 

 small boy's question, "Why did she want us to 

 chase her?" explained the world-old maneuver of 

 certain mother birds to attract human creatures 

 away from their nests, and furthermore puzzled 

 the small boy by the statement that a quail, if 

 she wanted to, could order her chicks to turn into 

 dead leaves, and they did it, too. While the 

 explanations had taken place, the lad, holding 

 the mother bird in both hands, had been cudgel- 

 ling his brain for a name for her. When it came, 

 it came like a flash, "Good Mrs. Stumpy"; 



