362 UPLAND SHOOTING. 



ishment from camp in case of failure two days being 

 allowed in which to accomplish it. 



Before sunrise next morning I was seated on a log, 

 half a mile from camp, anxiously waiting for Mr. 

 Gobbler to open the game at which he and I were to 

 play. It was a lovely spring morning. The violets and 

 the daisies had, ere this, breathed out their sweet 

 lives; the "red buds," that erstwhile wreathed with 

 pinkish blossoms every branch of the dark, polished 

 iron-wood trees, had all fallen, faded and limp, to the 

 earth in showers of sweetness, and, in the dim morning 

 light, looked like rose-leaves on the floor of a deserted 

 banquet-hall. The heavy, humid air still retained a faint 

 odor of the dying wild-plum blossoms, while the snowy 

 dogwood flowers were busily breaking their buds into 

 bloom, bridal-wreathing the gladsome spring. A mag- 

 nificent trumpet-vine, right over me, clinging to a dead 

 tree, and enwrapping itself around and about it, embow- 

 ering it in a shaft of living green, reaching skyward, 

 reminds me of Wirt's beautiful words about the vine and 

 the oak the wife, and the broken, discouraged husband. 

 The time of its flowers, grand carnation trumpets, is not 

 yet. Delicate silvery-green leaves are struggling into 

 form and dimension on elm, and oak, and blackberry, 

 and alder, while, here and there, a greenbrier-vine 

 unfolds its broad young leaves, ruddy with vigor, and 

 lovely with blushing beauty, not unlike delicate-tinted 

 Venetian gloss. The woods teem with life, and a thou- 

 sand wildwood voices are heard, from the scarlet song- 

 ster right in front of me, sending forth every few 

 moments his praiseful "tube, tube, tube," as he sits on 

 topmost twig of a tall elm, whose gracefully rounded and 

 upreaching bowers make for him a throne, silvery- 

 sheeny in the first rays of the morning sun, to the blue- 

 backed, white-breasted chorister whose name I never 



