a'! Where did they
a' come fra, and where are they a' gan? It's awfu' like a sin to kill
them!" To this some smug, practical old sinner would remark: "Aye,
it's a peety, as ye say, to kill the bonnie things, but they were made
to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were sent to God's
chosen people, the Israelites, when they were starving in the desert
ayont the Red Sea. And I must confess that meat was never put up in
neater, handsomer-painted packages."

In the New England and Canada woods beechnuts were their best and most
abundant food, farther north, cranberries and huckleberries. After
everything was cleaned up in the north and winter was coming on, they
went south for rice, corn, acorns, haws, wild grapes, crab-apples,
sparkle-berries, etc. They seemed to require more than half of the
continent for feeding-grounds, moving from one table to another,
field to field, forest to forest, finding something ripe and wholesome
all the year round. In going south in the fine Indian-summer weather
they flew high and followed one another, though the head of the flock
might be hundreds of miles in advance. But against head winds they
took advantage of the inequalities of the ground, flying comparatively
low. All followed the leader's ups and downs over hill and dale though
far out of sight, never hesitating at any turn of the way, vertical or
horizontal that the leaders had taken, though the largest flocks
stretched across several States, and belts of different kinds of
weather.

There were no roosting-or breeding-places near our farm, and I never
saw any of them until long after the great flocks were exterminated. I
therefore quote, from Audubon's and Pokagon's vivid descriptions.

"Toward evening," Audubon says, "they depart for the roosting-place,
which may be hundreds of miles distant. One on the banks of Green
River, Kentucky, was over three miles wide and forty long."

"My first view of it," says the great naturalist, "was about a
fortnight after it had been chosen by the birds, and I arrived there
nearly two hours before sunset. Few pigeons were then to be seen, but
a great many persons with horses and wagons and armed with guns, long
poles, sulphur pots, pine pitch torches, etc., had already established
encampments on the borders. Two farmers had driven upwards of three
hundred hogs a distance of more than a hundred miles to be fattened on
slaughtered pigeons. Here and there the people employed in pluck