30 
SHORE BIRDS. 
tite is a permanent passenger by every yacht; it lends a 
spice to food, assists in the cookery, helps along digestion 
and aids in many pleasant ways. Weariness smooths the 
small pillows, softens and widens the hard and narrow beds 
and brings balmy sleep. Supper over and even the bright 
rays of the kerosene lamp which lighted up the cabin like a 
private sun could not keep the party awake, nor persuade 
them to attend to the piles of literature they had brought to 
while away what never comes—the unoccupied and waste 
time of yachting. 
Four o’clock a. m., and Mr. Green remarked that if they 
had come to shoot snipe it would not do to lose the best part 
of the day. In ordinary life there may be a question which 
is the best part of the day. The business man may consider 
that from ten to three covers the case; the belle may select 
the same hours, but from a different portion of the twenty- 
four ; to the gourmand the dinner hour is all in all; to the 
speculator, the time of meeting of the Stock Board; to the 
lover, the hour when his mistress is visible;—but to the duck 
or snipe shooter, no time equals that from dawn to full sun¬ 
light. There was no need denying Mr. Green’s sage remark, 
though Sloth begged for a little more “folding of the hands 
to sleep,” and the Commissioner was fain to set out sleepy 
and breakfastles3 toward the shore in the dingy, accompanied 
by guns, ammunition, false birds and the paraphernalia of 
the fatal art. 
“Bay snipe,” a term that includes all the sandpipers, 
plovers, sanderlings, waders and snipes that follow the coast 
in their annual migrations from their summer nesting places 
in the neighborhood of Hudson’s Bay to their winter feeding 
places “away down South”—nobody knows exactly where 
or how far—are exceedingly gregarious in their nature. 
Therein lies a weakness that has proved most fatal to them 
and thinned their numbers from countless myriads that once 
fairly swarmed along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean during 
the summer and early autumn to a few desultory birds that 
scarcely ever constitute what is in sporting technique known 
as a “flight,” which means a continuous movement of flocks 
