UPLAND SHOOTING. 
227 
This is, that under these circumstances, the birds will not rise 
at all, until they are literally almost trodden upon. It was very 
long before I could bring myself to b'elieve in the existence of 
this singular power of suppression ; and very many times, after 
having marked down a bevy to a yard in favorable ground, and 
having failed to start them, I have left the place, concluding 
that they had taken to the trees, or risen again unseen by me, 
when I am satisfied, had I waited half an hour before proceed¬ 
ing to beat for them, I might have had good sport. I will here 
observe, that although Quail do, beyond doubt, occasionally 
take the tree, in certain localities, and in some kinds of weather, 
still so far as my experience goes, they do so rarely when pur¬ 
sued, and then rather in consequence of some particular habit 
of a single bevy, than of any natural instinct of the bird. 
Once again—and I have done with the difficulties of finding— 
particular bevies, endowed with that singular craft, which ap¬ 
proaches so very nearly to reason, that it hardly can be distin¬ 
guished therefrom, will fly when flushed, invariably for many 
days and weeks in succession, to some one small out-of-the-way 
nook, or clump of briars, so long as that nook is undiscovered, 
thus baffling all attempts to find them. 
In one instance, while shooting in the vale of Warwick, with 
an old comrade, when returning home late in the evening, and 
when within two hundred yards of his hospitable tavern, he said 
he thought he could start a bevy by the stream side, where he 
had observed that they often roosted. 
Accordingly we went to the place, and had not gone ten yards 
into the bogs, before the Setters, of which we had three, all 
came to their point simultaneously, and a large bevy of sixteen 
or eighteen birds jumped up before them. We got in our four 
barrels, and killed four birds handsomely; and marked the 
birds over the comer of a neighboring wood, lowering their 
flight so rapidly, that we had no doubt of finding them on a 
buckwheat stubble, surrounded by thick sumach bushes, and 
briary hedges, which lay just beyond the grove. 
We hunted till it was quite dark, however, without moving 
