WHERE RUNS THE TIDE. 195 



bird-man that I mistook a "teeter's" nest for that of 

 a solitary sand-piper is absurd. Let me add that I 

 once shot a female " solitary" and found in it an 

 egg with the shell well advanced, and it is ridicu- 

 lous to suppose that such an egg could have been 

 carried to the Arctic circle for depositing ; nor shall 

 I ever forget the distress caused to its mate by my 

 act That pair of birds, which had been staying 

 about the mucky meadow for a week or more, in- 

 tended to nest as near as the mountains of Pennsyl- 

 vania, to which they could have flown in half a day ; 

 and, to my certain knowledge, a pair of solitary 

 sand-pipers once had their nest near a spring in the 

 old White Horse woods. 



In the upland plover which, by the way, is not 

 a plover, but a sand-piper we have an entertaining 

 inland species which practically deserted this neigh- 

 borhood forty years ago, although previous to that 

 time it was very abundant, particularly in August, 

 when the birds that had been bred in the higher, 

 rolling Pennsylvania grass fields collected here pre- 

 vious to their autumnal migratorial flight. 



Across the river, and not far away either, these 

 birds may be seen during the entire summer, and if 

 they are always as attractive as I once found them 

 among the Lehigh hills, I have excellent reason to 

 be envious. The prosy exploration of an old In- 

 dian jasper quarry was being most perfunctorily 

 done, when I heard the soft, pleading whistle of a 

 grass plover, and I spent half that morning trying 

 to discover the bird. The ground here was thickly 



