February, 1918 
FOREST ANI) STREAM 
95 
T HOSE who are fortunate enough to 
live where town and country meet 
can do excellent service by placing 
grain for the game birds. Sportsmen can 
make this the object of their winter tramps 
in the open. A large wooden box, laid on 
its side, with the opening facing in the 
most sheltered direction, and supplied with 
grain or other foods, is sometimes used to 
attract the ground-feeding birds. Bob- 
whites, pheasants, song sparrows, j uncos 
and other birds often come to a box so 
placed. Some brush and evergreen 
branches heaped around the back and sides 
make it more attractive. 
Many State Fish and Game Departments 
and some sportsmen’s associations have 
furnished free grain to those who would 
distribute it in suitable places. This good 
work means many flocks of quail, grouse 
and pheasants saved from starvation, espe¬ 
cially if carried on through the late win¬ 
ter and early spring, as that is the hard¬ 
est time of the entire year for the birds. 
All exposed seeds and berries have been 
eaten, and repeated storms and thaws keep 
what food there is on the ground covered 
with snow and ice. If we start feeding a 
flock of birds we should keep it up well 
into the spring. The morning after a 
heavy storm the birds need all the help we 
can offer. If we teach them to trust us 
and to come to us for their daily food let 
us not desert them when they need our 
help the most, for the world would be a 
dreary place without the singing birds. 
YOUR HUNTING TROPHY-WHAT ABOUT IT? 
HUNTING TRADITIONS WHICH HAVE PERSISTED THROUGH CENTURIES ARE 
RELATED IN THE SECOND PART OF THE REVIEW OF “THE MASTER OF GAME” 
By HENRY RICHMOND COYLE 
O NE of the best sports of students is 
that of comparative philology, chasing 
down the derivation of any word in the 
English language, which of itself is made 
up of several different languages, Saxon, 
Greek, Norman, French, Latin. Yet more 
interesting is the tracing down of a cus¬ 
tom or of an example of etiquette. For 
instance, we have with us tonight the 
loving cup, often given as a present by a 
lot of admiring friends to a successful 
automobile agent or other competitor who 
has been promoted elsewhere, much to the 
delight of all concerned. This loving cup 
has three handles. Why ? Because in the 
olden times it was fashionable to cut a 
man’s throat just as he tilted his head 
back to take a drink after you had passed 
him a drink. Now, if you had hold of 
two of the handles when he passed the 
cup, his neighbor could tell pretty well 
that he was fully occupied at the time. 
There are scores of other instances of 
etiquette wholly arbitrary and sometimes 
meaningless, which have come down to us 
out of the past in some way. 
B UT of these many strange and inter¬ 
esting contributions of the past to 
modern times, nothing is more beauti¬ 
ful than the traditions of the fellowship, 
the comradeship of the chase, the love of 
' horse and hound, the love of one’s fellow 
man for the sake of what there is in him 
of manliness. “The Master of Game” has 
many a quaint and lasting touch of human¬ 
ness in its pages—as for instance where 
the old hunter tells of the love of a good 
dog, a thing changeless through all ages. 
“A hound has great diligence and great 
might, a hound is of great worthiness and 
of great sutlety, a hound is of great light¬ 
ness and of great perseverance (?). a 
hound is of good obedience, for he will 
learn as a man all that a man will teach 
him. A hound is full of good sport; 
hounds are so good that there is scarcely 
a man that would not have of them, some 
for one craft, and some for another. 
Hounds are hardy', for a hound dare well 
keep his master’s house, and his beasts, 
and also he will keep all his master’s 
goods, and he would sooner die than any¬ 
thing be lost in his keeping.” 
In these pages lives a deathless good 
cheer, a fine thing to ponder upon as one 
reads. When the hunt breakfast or the 
hunt supper really begins, “and when the 
curee is done, and the bay made, then is 
the time for every man to draw homeward 
to his supper and to make himself as merry 
as he can. And when the yeomen berners 
and grooms have led home the hounds and 
set them well up and supplied them with 
water and straw according to what they 
need, then should they go to their supper 
and drink well and make merry.” 
Quite a picture juts in that paragraph, if 
you please—we equal it today with pic¬ 
tures of the tent and the camp fire in the 
woods and the humble meal which offers 
unparalleled comradeship. 
I presume that certain good mothers in 
Israel today believe that they themselves 
are the inventors of the picnic or the 
basket lunch. Not so. Ere ever there was 
a Sunday School picnic, I ween, there was 
the woodside meal of hunters. 
“For all they that go to the quest should 
all come again in a certain place that I 
have spoken of. And also they that come 
from home, and all the officers that come 
from home should bring thither all that 
they need, every one in his office, well 
and plenteously, and should lay the towels 
and board clothes all about upon the green 
grass, and set divers meats upon a great 
platter after the lord’s power. And some 
should eat sitting, and some standing, and 
some leaning upon their elbows, some 
should drink, some laugh, some jangle, 
some joke and some play—in short do all 
manner of disports of gladness, and when 
men be set at tables ere they eat then 
should come the lymerers and their grooms 
with their lymers the which have been 
questing, and every one shall say his re¬ 
port to the lord. And when they shall 
have eaten, the lord shall devise where the 
relays shall go and other things which I 
shall say more plainly, and then shall every 
man speed him to his place, and all haste 
them to go to the finding.” 
(continued on page 122) 
