112 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING. 
remainder of the pack sought safer quarters. They had 
no sooner started, however, than the terrier pursued 
them, and kept barking all the way until he got beyond 
our hearing. 
Picking up the dead birds, we went after the dog, as 
we knew he would not stop until he flushed another 
brood or saw those started alight, but we had not pro- 
ceeded fifty yards before we came upon a mother and her 
nearly full-grown brood. We tried to make them rise by 
firing sticks and stones at them, but our efforts proved 
unavailing, for they kept running ahead of us and cluck- 
ing occasionally, or trying to hide in the undergrowth. 
We finally dashed in among them, and, flushing them, 
fired a volley, which gave us two brace and a half. Hav- 
ing shouldered the birds, we trudged onward through 
masses of matted briers, broken branches, and fallen 
leaves, which seemed to be far more numerous than ever 
they were at Vallambrosa, until we came to a beautiful 
meadow, which was covered with a most luxuriant 
growth of grass and wild flowers, and surrounded by gigan- 
tic firs and spruces, so that it resembled an artificial park. 
In looking over this, we obtained a vista of the Pacific 
Ocean through a magnificent avenue of trees, and could 
hear its rumbling and hissing as the huge billows surged 
shoreward, and its dirge-like cadence as they slowly re- 
ceded. The air was as still as that of a picture, and the 
only sounds that disturbed the awful silence of the forest 
were the scolding, croaking chatter of the blue jay, which 
resented our intrusion on its sacred ground, and the soft 
notes of that little woodland rambler, the peewee, which 
seems attached to the humid depths of the woods, where 
its only feathered companions are the grouse and an oc- 
casional hawk. 
The scene was so fair and yet so majestic, that we for- 
got all about our mission, and gazed in silent rapture 
upon the beauty spread before us, While we were lost 
