long yellow legs, and squawking fit to wake the dead.

Down clapped the pheasant as if the noise had pierced his heart, and
remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so
easy to see. But it was no good. Up shot the dozen heads above the
herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his vicinity with
empty-headed inquisitiveness.

He almost melted into the ground, but it was useless. An old, old
hen--who perhaps was ignored by the lord of the harem, and hoped for an
adventure--waddled up, stood within a yard of his crouched, rounded
shape without seeing him, saw him, shot straight up in the air at least
one foot, screaming for help, and promptly charged blindly into the
hedge, where she as promptly got held up among roots and twigs.

The old pheasant got to his feet just as the rooster who owned the
outfit came racing up, panting and red. He had heard a wife scream for
help. Perhaps it was the odd bird out; or, anyway, some one who had to
be abolished. And he never waited to think. He saw what might have
been a small cockerel (if it had been large he might have thought
twice) crouching, and--he just sailed right in.

Then something happened. The two met, going up breast to breast. For
a moment or two the cock-pheasant showed on or about that big rooster.
Some feathers hung in the air. The rooster sat on his heels, met by a
blow in the chest that seemed to take all the wind from his sails, so
to speak, and would have drawn off to reconsider things if he had not
promptly become more busy than ever before in his life.

It was over ere any one knew quite what was happening. The old
cock-pheasant had passed through the crowd and vanished at the double
down the hedge, and the big rooster was slowly subsiding into a pool of
his own blood, from which he was destined never to rise again.

But those who make, instead of following, their own destiny do not get
let off thus lightly in the wild. The pheasant had not gone a hundred
yards, when a most intolerable blast, an almost unbearable blast, of
shrill, nerve-racking noise throbbed through his head. The bird fell
in his tracks where he ran, as if some one had jerked his legs from
under him, and he peered out.

What he beheld was an under-keeper standing close by and blowing upon a
two-note pea-whistle till there seemed some danger that he would burst
his cheeks, or a blood-vessel, on the spot, and far up the field three
wandering pheasant