THE AMERICAN QUAIL. 255 
and evergreen rock-calmias, to nearer woodskirts, and 
cedar-brakes margining the red buckwheat stubbles, to 
be found there by the staunch dogs, and brought to bag. 
by the quick death-shot, “at morn and dewy eve,” with- 
out the toil and torture, often most vain and vapid, of 
scaling miles on miles of mountain-ledges, struggling 
through thickets of impenetrable verdure among the 
close-set stems of hemlock, pine, or juniper, only to hear 
the startled rush of an unseen pinion, and to pause, 
breathless, panting, and outdone, to curse, while you 
gather breath for a renewed effort, the bird which haunts 
such covert, and the covert which gives shelter to such 
birds. 
In this month, if no untimely frost, or envious snow 
flurry come, premature, to chase him to the sunny 
swamps of Carolina and the rice-fields of Georgia, the 
plump, white-fronted, pink-legged autumn Woodcock, 
flaps up from the alder-brake with his shrill whistle, and 
soars away, away, on a swift and powerful wing above 
the russet tree-tops, to be arrested only by the instinctive 
eye and rapid finger of the genuine sportsman ; and no 
longer as in faint July to be bullied and bungled to 
death by every German city pot-hunter, or every potter- 
ing rustic school-boy, equipped and primed for murder, 
on his Saturday’s half holyday. 
In this month, the brown-jacketed American hare, 
which our folk wid persist in calling Rabbit—though it 
neither lives in warrens, nor burrows habitually under 
