264 AMERICAN GAME. 
usually at the bottom of a tussock or tuft of grass, her 
eggs being pure white, and from ten to thirty-two in 
number, though about fourteen is probably the average 
of the bevies. The period of incubation is about four 
weeks, the young birds run the instant they clip the 
shell, and fly readily before they have been hatched a 
fortnight. So soon as the first brood is well on the wing, 
the cock takes charge of it, and the hen proceeds to lay 
and hatch a second, the male bird and first brood 
remaining in the close vicinity, and the parents, I doubt 
‘not, attending the labor of incubation and attending the 
young. This I have long suspected ; but I saw so many 
proofs of it, in company of my friend and fellow sports- 
man, “ Dinks,” while shooting together near Fort Malden, 
in Canada West—where we found, in many instances, 
two distinct bevies of different sizes with a single pair 
of old birds, when shooting early in September of last 
year—that we were equally convinced of the truth of 
the fact, and of the unfitness of the season. 
In October, with the exception of a very few late 
broods, they are fit for the gun; and then, while the 
stubbles are long, and the weeds and grasses rank, they 
lie the best and are the least wild-on the wing. The 
early mornings and late afternoons are the fittest times 
for finding them, when they are on the run, and feeding 
in the edges of wheat and rye stubbles, or buckwheat 
patches bordering on woodlands. In the middle of the 
day they either lie up in little brakes and bog-meadows, 
