SMALL COUNTRY NEIGHBORS 413 



" On May I2th last Dick saw a flock of about thirty wild 

 pigeons, followed at a short distance by about half as many, 

 flying in a circle very rapidly, between the Plain Dealing 

 house and the woods, where they disappeared. They had 

 pointed tails and resembled somewhat large doves the breast 

 and sides rather a brownish red. He had seen them before, 

 but many years ago. I think it is unquestionably the passenger 

 pigeon Ectopistes mlgratorlus described on p. 25 of the 5th 

 volume of Audubon. I remember the pigeon roosts as he de- 

 scribes them, on a smaller scale, but large flocks have not been 

 seen in this part of Virginia for many years." 



I fear, by the way, that the true prairie chicken, one 

 of the most characteristic American game birds, will soon 

 follow the passenger pigeon. My two elder sons have 

 now and then made trips for prairie chickens and ducks 

 to the Dakotas. Last summer, 1907, the second boy re- 

 turned from such a trip which he had ended by a suc- 

 cessful deer hunt in Wisconsin with the melancholy in- 

 formation that the diminution in the ranks of the prairie 

 fowl in the Dakotas was very evident. 



The house at Pine Knot consists of one long room, 

 with a broad piazza, below, and three small bedrooms 

 above. It is made of wood, with big outside chimneys 

 at each end. Wood rats and white-footed mice visit it; 

 once a weasel came in after them; now a flying squirrel 

 has made his home among the rafters. On one side the 

 pines and on the other side the oaks come up to the walls ; 

 in front the broom sedge grows almost to the piazza and 

 above the line of its waving plumes we look across the 

 beautiful rolling Virginia farm country to the foot-hills 



