64 AMERICAN GAME. 



with continuous ice, forbidding them' to obtain their food, 

 and compelling them yet once again to take wing and 

 fly more southward yet, to where no frost nor north-east 

 tempest cometh. 



During this visit it is that they afford the most sport 

 to the gunner, and that they are harassed, especially 

 about Long Island, by every poacher's device and arti- 

 fice which can be devised to slay them, fairly or unfairly, 

 by man, wholly without consideration, and reckless that 

 the slaughter on their very feeding grounds is fast ban- 

 ishing them from regions where, with all their watchful 

 sentries out and on the alert, they are decimated hourly 

 by volleys from unseen and unsuspected foes. 



The worst, most murderous, and least sportsmanly of 

 all these artifices is " the battery" an engine long but 

 vainly proscribed and prohibited by the New York Leg- 

 islatures, but still in use in all the Long Island waters, 

 though the shrewder, if not more honest or less poaching 

 Jerseymen, tolerate it not in their lagoons and inlets, 

 which still swarm with the fowl daily" seen less and 

 less in the Long Island bays. 



" The battery," says a good writer in the Spirit of the 

 Times, " is formed of a deal box, about seven feet long, 

 three wide, and two deep ; from the rim of this a plat- 

 form of board runs off at right angles, about six feet on 

 every side, and the interior is caulked to render it water 

 .tight. This is moored on some shoal where the birds 

 are observed to be in the habit of resorting, and bal- 



