A DAY’S OUTING IN SEARCH OF THE ARBUTUS. 55 
drumming place of partridges for several consecutive 
years. I was just in time to see the performer walk 
across a path a few feet from the log, and soon I heard 
his wings as he flew to another part of the woods. 
The drummer is a wary bird at these times, and one 
seldom gets a sight of him at his performance. No 
other sound in nature, except, perhaps, the honking.of 
wild geese as they fly northward or southward in their 
wedge-shaped flocks, so thrills me as the drumming of 
the partridge; the sensations produced are undefinable, 
as the cause is unexplainable. Association may have 
much to do with it, as in these later years the sound 
always carries my thoughts back to the maple 
woods of the old homestead on the hillside, when this 
was the sweetest music that cheered the boys at their 
toilsome but wholesome sugar-making. Then I knew 
every drumming log for miles around, and every spring 
I kept watch and ward of at least a half dozen nests 
of these attractive birds. 
Who that loves nature can help loving the partridge ? 
not in the pot, but in the woods. It is such a hand- 
some bird, hardy and innocent, and as Thoreau says, 
“like a russet link extending over from autumn to 
spring, preserving unbroken the choir of summer.” If 
left unmolested for a few years what an added charm they 
would give to all the woods. They are not in any way 
trespassers on man’s products. Why not let them alone 
in their forest retreats that ought to be sacred to them ? 
I remember a brood that I had watched with boyish 
pride all summer; I had found the nest when there 
