228 Life and Immortality. 
poor birds find themselves in a prison from which they can- 
not break out before they starve to death. The habit of 
huddling is peculiar to Quails the whole year round. They 
select at evening some spot of low ground, where the long 
grass affords shelter and warmth, and there they encamp, 
sleeping in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, with heads turned 
out, keeping each other warm, and ready to escape at a 
moment's warning without stumbling over one another. A 
suitable roosting-place once found, night after night they 
repair thither, leaving it in the morning before sunrise to 
seek their breakfast. 
Unless the winter be unusually mild, they may be seen 
associating in the pasture with the cattle, and even following 
them home to glean the grain that falls into the barnyard, 
and pick up the scraps that are thrown to the chickens. 
This delightful confidence is not always abused, for many 
persons take pains to foster the bevies they find spend- 
ing the winter in some brushy hillside near the house 
by daily scattering grain or clover-seed upon the snow 
where the hungry birds may come and get it. The pert air 
with which one of the cocks will perch himself on a fence- 
rider or walk sedately along a stone wall in the early sun- 
light of a glistening January morning is reward enough to 
the benefactor, if he cares not to preserve them for the selfish 
pleasure of shooting them the following autumn. 
As a delicate article of food the Quail is highly esteemed, 
and during the time the law allows the markets are filled 
with bunches of them. Various devices in the form of 
snares, nets and traps are called into service to effect their 
capture, and in some parts of the country, New England 
especially, fresh importations have been necessary to pre- 
serve a sufficient number for sport. Bands of beaters in the 
Southern and Western States cautiously drive immense 
flocks into nets, but there is less danger of exterminating 
this than almost any other species of game-bird, it would 
seem, on account of its sequestered habits and prolificacy. 
