
606 THE CLAPPER RAIL. 
reckless, and their jovial, if unmusical, notes resound till the 
very reeds seem to quake. It is as if some irresistible joke 
was going the rounds, making every bird laugh outright as 
soon as it was told. With scarcely a change of name, in 
fact, the Clapper Rail’s nature, and function in bird-society, 
is perfectly expressed. It should be spelled in French style 
—claqueur. Unobtrusive, unrecognized except by a few, 
almost unknown to the uninitiated, the birds steadily and 
faithfully fulfil their allotted parts; like claqueurs they fill 
the pit, ready at a sign, to applaud anything—or nothing— 
that may be going on in the drama of life before them. 
I do not wish to be tedious; but I have a story that I can 
vouch for as being something new. It is "another rail-road 
accident;" when will publie opinion force the companies to 
be more careful? Suppressing an obtrusive pun upon iron 
and other rails, for it is unbecoming to joke over a melan- 
choly case of suicide, I will merely say that a rail was found 
lying dead upon the track that divides two pieces of marsh 
at Fort Macon. Now we have all read certain singular sto- 
ries, perhaps in *Ord's Wilson," to the effect that rails are 
subject to remarkable spells of fear or anger, or something 
of that sort, that throw them into epileptic fits. I thought 
at first, here was a real case in point; for the bird was dead, 
yet without a sign of external violence, even so much as the 
ruffling of the plumage. Stooping to pick him up, however, 
I found that he had got both legs wedged fast in the crack 
between the ends of two contiguous rails; he was in fact so 
firmly caught that I had some little trouble in liberating his 
dead body. He had evidently tried to walk between the 
rails instead of stepping over them; but how he ever man- 
.. aged to "put his foot in it” so effectively I cannot imagine, 
for there was not a fourth of an inch of space. Still the 
= fact remains. In the inquest held upon this unlucky rail— 
Victim of the “blind decrees of fate," as the novelists say — 
y discovered abundant cause of death, without falling back 
LAETUS 
pon any hypothesis of mental emotion. He had beat him- 




