156 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



willow-fringed brooks and reedy margined estuaries for ducks 

 and winter wild fowl, is about the sequence in which hillside 

 and cover alternately interest the sportsman. In autumn 

 he has done with Perth and Rosshire, or he has very nearly 

 done with them. There is a thin skin of snow, perhaps, 011 

 the caps of the highest peaks around his moorland lodge, and 

 a suggestive hoar frost or two has touched the bells of the 

 heather, making the bracken undergrowth of the birch and 

 spruce thickets, beloved of the rabbits, glow in amber and 

 red brown. 



Whipping for trout he finds, in an open boat, with a 

 gillie to row and take all the warmth-giving exercise, has 

 become but a chilly pleasure ; so the trout have a holiday, at 

 least in the very far north, while grouse and blackgame can 

 exchange their opinion^ upon the last shooting season with- 

 out fear of much further interruption. 



As for the stubbles, some of the most enjoyable sport on 

 them is yet to come in favoured lo-calities. We know the 

 midland turnips have been assiduously stumped by the 

 orthodox squadron of shooters in line with their beaters and 

 dogs, and Suffolk has driven its broods hither and thither 

 over the hedges, rich in their harvest of scarlet berries, 

 behind which the latter-day sportsmen are content to stand 

 and enfilade the coveys as they rush by ; but in spite of all 

 this, there is plenty of pretty shooting still left on the frosty 

 mornings of early winter, when the sun gets up behind the 

 bare ash thickets, a heavy red ball of fire, the stubble is 

 brittle as glass underfoot, and the fieldfares are quarrelling 

 noisily over the ivy berries and haws. Then, with a clever 

 setter, as the day warms, we may try the woodsides and the 

 low-lying rushy meadows for partridges with every prospect 

 of success. 



But October and November are properly the pheasant 

 shooter's months. Theoretically, no doubt, the season begins 

 on October 1st, but the truth is the mild autumnal rains 

 with which September makes fresh and tillable the summer- 



