of the
woods, from a drowsy teacher who studied law by night, but never his
boys by day,--that was a bird to be respected. I have studied him with
keener interest ever since.

Yet however much you study the grouse, you learn little except how wild
he is. Occasionally, when you are still in the woods and a grouse walks
up to your hiding place, you get a fair glimpse and an idea or two; but
he soon discovers you, and draws himself up straight as a string and
watches you for five minutes without stirring or even winking. Then,
outdone at his own game, he glides away. A rustle of little feet on
leaves, a faint kwit-kwit with a question in it, and he is gone. Nor
will he come back, like the fox, to watch from the other side and find
out what you are.

Civilization, in its first advances, is good to the grouse, providing
him with an abundance of food and driving away his enemies. Grouse are
always more numerous about settlements than in the wilderness. Unlike
other birds, however, he grows wilder and wilder by nearness to men's
dwellings. I suppose that is because the presence of man is so often
accompanied by the rush of a dog and the report of a gun, and perhaps by
the rip and sting of shot in his feathers as he darts away. Once, in the
wilderness, when very hungry, I caught two partridges by slipping over
their heads a string noose at the end of a pole. Here one might as well
try to catch a bat in the twilight as to hope to snare one of our upland
partridges by any such invention, or even to get near enough to meditate
the attempt.

But there was one grouse--and he the very wildest of all that I have
ever met in the woods--who showed me unwittingly many bits of his life,
and with whom I grew to be very well acquainted after a few seasons'
watching. All the hunters of the village knew him well; and a half-dozen
boys, who owned guns and were eager to join the hunters' ranks, had a
shooting acquaintance with him. He was known far and wide as "the ol'
beech pa'tridge." That he was old no one could deny who knew his ways
and his devices; and he was frequently scared-up in a beech wood by a
brook, a couple of miles out of the village.

Spite of much learned discussion as to different varieties of grouse,
due to marked variations in coloring, I think personally that we have
but one variety, and that differences in color are due largely to the
different surroundings in which they live. Of all birds the grouse is
most invisib