32 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



We can only be glad such an admirable little game bird 

 is still left to us, and if our brothers of smock frocks are 

 each to have "three acres and a cow/' then we respectfully 

 petition in the name of those Avho love the gun, that our 

 portion may be, forty acres and a snipe ! 



WHY SNIPE ARE SCARCE. 



Though the misguided English yokel, who is to have the 

 heifer and the triple meads as his share, may do much 

 damage to our native wildfowl haunts, I doubt if he is 

 responsible for the death of all those birds unmarked by 

 shot which wave in the wind over our purveyors' stalls like 

 the companions of Ulysses in the Cave of the Cyclops. It 

 is rather the ingenious and mercenary foreigner who sweeps 

 his fens and hill-sides to cater for the discriminating taste 

 of " mi lord Anglais," and sends us " poached " snipe and 

 woodcock by the crate full. Even our good cousins across 

 the Atlantic, now ice rooms or refrigerators are fitted to 

 nearly all steamships, evade their none too stringent game 

 laws, dispatching us netted wild birds from Chesapeake Bay 

 and the wonderful rice swamps of the interior. More than 

 a few of our Leadenhall wild geese and ducks have come 

 from the Yankee shores, and even, perhaps, that turkey 

 who makes a final appearance at our Christmas boards may 

 hail from the chippy curtilages of Canadian squatters' 

 wigwams or the adjacent snow-buried pine forest. 



It is clear, for instance, when we read in weekly market 

 reports how woodcock are selling at a few shillings a brace, 

 while under the same date a sporting paper goes into ecstasies 

 over the fact that a single couple of these little winter 

 visitors have been flushed from a south coast spinney, 

 that the market must perforce be supplied from some 

 other source, and we should look abroad for it. Not so very 

 long ago Cornwall and Devon were equal to the epicures' 

 demand, and Exeter coaches of the day used to bring as many 



