SMALL COUNTRY NEIGHBORS 407 



ton's tomb itself, for the twenty years since I have known 

 it. The cardinals, beautiful in plumage, and with clear 

 ringing voices, are characteristic of the place. I am 

 glad to say that the woods still hold many gray not red 

 foxes; the descendants of those which Washington so 

 perseveringly hunted. 



At Oyster Bay on a desolate winter afternoon many 

 years ago I shot an Ipswich sparrow on a strip of ice- 

 rimmed beach, where the long coarse grass waved in 

 front of a growth of blue berries, beach plums and 

 stunted pines. I think it was the same winter that we 

 were visited not only by flocks of cross-bills, pine linnets, 

 red-polls and pine grossbeaks, but by a number of snowy 

 owls, which flitted to and fro in ghost-like fashion across 

 the wintry landscape and showed themselves far more 

 diurnal in their habits than our native owls. One fall 

 about the same time a pair of duck-hawks appeared off 

 the bay. It was early, before many ducks had come, and 

 they caused havoc among the night herons, which were 

 then very numerous in the marshes around Lloyd's Neck, 

 there being a big heronry in the woods near by. Once 

 I saw a duck-hawk come around the bend of the shore, 

 and dart into a loose gang of young night herons, still in 

 the brown plumage, which had jumped from the marsh 

 at my approach. The pirate struck down three herons in 

 succession and sailed swiftly on without so much as look- 

 ing back at his victims. 1 The herons, which are usually 



l Dr. Lambert last fall, on a hunting trip in Northern Quebec, found a gyrfal- 

 con on an island in a lake which had just killed a great blue heron; the heron's 

 feathers were scattered all over the lake. Lambert also shot a great horned owl 

 in the dusk one evening, and found that it had a half-eaten duck in its claws. 



