ed; but I dared not move, because he was looking straight over me.
Some faint sound, too faint for my ears, made him turn his head, and on
the instant I reached for the tiny rifle lying before me in the canoe.
Just as he spread his wings to investigate the new sound, the little
rifle spoke, and he tumbled heavily to the shore.

"One robber the less," I was thinking, when the canoe swung slightly on
the water. There was a heavy plunge, a vicious rush of my unheeded line,
and I seized my rod to find myself fast to a big trout, which had been
watching my flies from his hiding among the lily pads till his
suspicions were quieted, and the first slight movement brought him up
with a rush.

Ten minutes later he lay in my canoe, where I could see him plainly to
my heart's content. I was waiting for the pool to grow quiet again, when
a new sound came from the underbrush, a rapid _plop, lop, lop, lop,
lop_, like the sound in a sunken bottle as water pours in and the air
rushes out.

There was a brook near the sounds, a lazy little stream that had lost
itself among the alders and forgotten all its music; and my first
thought was that some animal was standing in the water to drink, and
waking the voice of the brook as the current rippled past his legs. The
canoe glided over to find out what he was, when, in the midst of the
sounds, came the unmistakable _Whit-kwit?_ of partridges--and there they
were, just vanishing glimpses of alert forms and keen eyes gliding among
the tangled alder stems. When near the brook they had changed the soft,
gossipy chatter, by which a flock holds itself together in the wild
tangle of the burned lands, into a curious liquid sound, so like the
gurgling of water by a mossy stone that it would have deceived me
completely, had I not seen the birds. It was as if they tried to remind
the little alder brook of the music it had lost far back among the
hills.

Now I had been straitly charged, on leaving camp, to bring back three
partridges for our Sunday dinner. My own little flock had grown a bit
tired of trout and canned foods; and a taste of young broiled grouse,
which I had recently given them, had left them hungry for more. So I
left the pool and my fishing rod, just as the trout began to rise, to
glide into the alders with my pocket rifle.

There were at least a dozen birds there, full-grown and strong of wing,
that had not yet decided to scatter to the four winds, as had most of
the coveys which on