CHAPTER LXXI. 



WILD-FOWLING IN AMERICA. 



"A weary waste ! 



We passed through pools, where muscle, clam, and wilk, 

 Clove to their gravelly beds ; o'er slimy rocks, 

 Ridgy and dark, with dank fresh fuci green, 

 Where the prawn wriggled, and the tiny crab 

 Slid sideway from our path, until we gain'd 

 The land's extremest point, a sandy jut, 

 Narrow, and by the weltering waves begirt 

 Around ; and there we laid us down, and watch'd, 

 While from the west the pale moon disappear' d, 

 Pronely, the sea-fowl and the coming dawn." 



The Fowler ; by DELTA. 



WILD-FOWL are, probably, as numerous in America as in any 

 quarter of the globe. Some of the States of that country are most 

 favourably adapted to their reception ; though the modern system of 

 draining- is vigorously progressing in many parts, with the same 

 gigantic strides it has made in England; and thus some of the 

 favourite haunts of the aquatic species have been considerably en- 

 croached upon. 



The drowned lands of Orange County, the meadows of Chatham 

 and Pine Brook, the Passaic and its tributaries, before the modern 

 system of draining and embanking, offered the fairest possible retreats 

 for wild-fowl. In those parts thousands of acres of luxuriant soil 

 were annually covered with shallow water ; and those inundated flats 

 were sometimes literally blackened with all the varieties of wild-fowl 

 known throughout the land.* 



But it is not in those parts of America only, that wild-fowl are so 

 numerous. They abound in all the States of the country, wherever 



* Vide Herbert's Field Sports in the United States :" A.D. 1848. 



