ODDS AND ENDS 289 
adding, when speaking of a place, ‘If you know 
where that is.’ Cross-examined by an eminent 
K.C., he said he came ‘from near Shrewsbury— 
if you know where that is.’ Counsel confessed that 
he ‘seemed to remember the name.’ 
I slipped five odd eggs into a partridge nest in 
which, apparently, there were about a dozen eggs— 
the next time I came that way there were forty- 
three. What a good thing it is that two partridges 
very rarely lay in one nest! There were fifty-three 
eggs in a wonderful co-operative nest—pheasants’, 
fowls’, English and French partridges’, guinea-fowls’, 
and turkeys’. A partridge, as arule, is ready enough 
to forsake her nest if her eggs are removed; but I 
knew one partridge that not only persisted in laying 
in the nest from which I had removed her first three 
eggs, but also after I had destroyed the nest with 
my boot. So I covered the spot with a flint as big 
as a dinner-plate; and she laid at the side of the 
stone. 
A keeper acquaintance told me of another per- 
severing partridge : her nest was found, when there 
were only a few eggs in it, at the side of a quiet ride 
much used by the keepers going to and from the 
rearing-field. Any odd partridge eggs were placed 
in this nest. Twice the nest and eggs were upset 
by the burrowing ot a mole, and twice a keeper 
made up a fresh nest for the eggs, which finally 
numbered forty-four. In spite of the interference of 
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