204 TOM draw's visit to pine brook. 



barrel in the very act of turning, and sooner almost than 

 I could imagine the possibility of his even catching sight 

 of them, a second snipe was fluttering down wing-tipped. 



"Beautiful, beautiful indeed," I cried involuntarily ; "the 

 quickest and the cleanest double-shot I have seen in many 

 a day." 



"It warnt so darned slow, no how," replied Tom, some- 

 what crest-fallen, as he re-loaded his huge demi-cannon. 



"Slow! you old heathen! if you could shoot better than 

 a boy five years old, we should have had three birds — I 

 could have got two of those last just as well as not, if you 

 had knocked the first down like a christian sportsman — 

 but look! look at those devils," Harry went on, pointing 

 toward the birds, which had gone off, and at which he had 

 been gazing all the time; "confound them, they'er going 

 to drum ?" 



And so indeed they were; and for the first time in my 

 life I beheld a spectacle, which I had heard of indeed, but 

 never had believed fully, till my own eyes now witnessed 

 it. The two birds, which had been flushed, mounted up! 

 up! scaling the sky in short small circles, till they were 

 quite as far from this dull earth, as the lark, when "at 

 heaven's gate he sings" — and then dropt plumb down, as it 

 would seem, fifty feet in an instant, with a strange drum- 

 ming sound, which might be heard for a mile or more. 

 Then up they soared again, and again repeated their 

 manoeuver; while at each repetition of the sound another 

 and another bird flew up from every part of the wide 

 meadow, and joined those in mid ether; till there must 

 have been, at the least reckoning, forty snipe soaring and 

 drumming within the compass of a mile, rendering the 

 whole air vocal with that strange quivering hum, which 

 has been stated by some authors — and among these by the 

 ingenious and observant Gilbert White — to be ventrilo- 

 quous; although it is now pretty generally — and probably 

 with justice — conceded to be the efi"ect of a vibratory 

 motion of the quill feathers set obliquely, so as to make the 

 air whistle through them. For above an hour did this 

 wild work continue; not a bird descending from its "bad 

 eminence," but, on the contrary, each one that we flushed 

 out of distance, for they would not lie to the dogs at all, 

 rising at once to join them. "We have no chance," said 

 Harry, "no chance at all of doing anything, unless the 



