288 BIRDS, BEASTS, AND FISHES 



quaint, timid little nestlings, calling a-chuck, a-chuck, and 

 alighting a yard or so ahead on the marsh, the young ones 

 running eagerly up to their parents chirping; and so the 

 pretty little family goes its way to the spongy water-side, 

 where, under the rising light of the young moon, they take 

 their first lessons in bibbling. There they stay by the water- 

 side till they can fly, hiding like a mouse in the rank marsh 

 crops if a hen-harrier darken the sky, for that old bandit 

 loves a young snipe as well as any gourmet. And then the 

 family ranges the marshes, and a few friendly families join 

 company ; and by shooting-time herds of thirty or forty fly 

 restless in wet weather from marsh to rond, or from rond to 

 marsh. They won't " lay " in wet weather, for fear, mayhap, 

 of wetting their feathers, and such is a bad season for the 

 gunner. 



Should they have been robbed of their huge eggs, they 

 will lay again, so that young fledglings are at times found 

 as late as harvest a fact the gunner regrets, as he walks on 

 a still, bright day down to leeward, never to windward, ever 

 ready for their turning to right or left of him, affording a 

 splendid mark ; for if you go down to windward the snipe 

 will rise and twist away from you, offering a poor mark. 



And at that season they are plump, as an acute lawyer 

 once found. An old gunner had been out snipe-shooting 

 with him one day in August, and on the way home through 

 the straggly village the gunner made excuse to drop into a 

 shop to buy some high-dried herring for supper, when the 

 heaviest snipe was weighed six and a half ounces. 



On rejoining the lawyer, he offered to bet on the weight of 

 the heaviest snipe, backing it weighed over six ounces. The 

 lawyer said no under. The money was staked and the 

 snipe taken to the post-office, and lo ! it weighed over six 

 ounces and a half; and the old gunner is happy to this day 

 that he bested a lawyer. 



This same old gunner remembers when it was quite easy 

 to kill eleven brace of a morning twenty years ago ; and he 



