THE AMERICAN QUAIL. 255 



and evergreen rock-calmias, to nearer woodskirts, and 

 cedar-brakes margining the red buckwheat stubbles, to 

 be found there by the staunch dogs, and brought to bag 

 by the quick death-shot, " at morn and dewy eve," with- 

 out the toil and torture, often most vain and vapid, of' 

 scaling miles on miles of mountain-ledges, struggling 

 through thickets of impenetrable verdure among the 

 close-set stems of hemlock, pine, or juniper, only to hear 

 the startled rush of an unseen pinion, and to pause, 

 breathless, panting, and outdone, to curse, while you 

 gather breath for a renewed effort, the bird which haunts 

 such covert, and the covert which gives shelter to such 

 birds. 



In this month, if no untimely frost, or envious snow 

 flurry come, premature, to chase him to the sunny 

 swamps of Carolina and the rice-fields of Georgia, the 

 plump, white-fronted, pink-legged autumn Woodcock, 

 flaps up from the alder-brake with his shrill whistle, and 

 soars away, away, on a swift and powerful wing above 

 the russet tree-tops, to be arrested only by the instinctive 

 eye and rapid finger of the genuine sportsman ; and no 

 longer as in faint July to be bullied and bungled to 

 death by every German city pot-hunter, or every potter- 

 ing rustic school-boy, equipped and primed for murder, 

 on his Saturday's half holyday. 



In this month, the brown-jacketed American hare, 

 which our folk will persist in- calling JRdbbit though it 

 neither lives in warrens, nor burrows habitually under 



