, perhaps, of many thousand acres, of the very
wildest, barest moorland, stocked with the wariest and shyest of the
feathered race, the red grouse. But what I mean to say, is this, that
every English game-bird--to use an American phrase--is warier and wilder
than its compeer in the United States. Who, for instance, ever saw in
England, Ireland, or Scotland, eighteen or twenty snipe or woodcock,
lying within a space of twelve yards square, two or three dogs pointing
in the midst of them, and the birds rising one by one, the gunshots
rattling over them, till ten or twelve are on the ground before there is
time to bag one.

"English partridge will, I grant, do this sometimes, on very warm days
in September; but let a man go out with his heavy gun and steady dog
late in December, or the month preceding it, let him see thirty or more
covies--as on good ground he may--let him see every covey rise at a
hundred yards, and fly a mile; let him be proud and glad to bag his
three or four brace; and then tell me that there is any sport in these
Atlantic States so wild as English winter field-shooting.

"Of grouse shooting on the bare hills, which, by the way, are wilder,
more solitary far, and more aloof from the abodes of men, than any thing
between Boston and the Green Bay, I do not of course speak; as it
confessedly is the most wild and difficult kind of shooting.

"Still less of deer stalking--for Scrope's book has been read largely
even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the
standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is
driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport
on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular
exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can
bring you within range of the wild cattle of the hills.

"Battue shooting, I grant, is tame work; but partridge shooting, after
the middle of October, is infinitely wilder, requiring more exertion and
more toil than quail shooting. Even the pheasant--the tamest of our
English game--is infinitely bolder on the wing than the ruffed grouse,
or New York partridge; while about snipe and woodcock there exists no
comparison--since by my own observation, confirmed by the opinion of old
sportsmen, I am convinced that nine-tenths of the snipe and cock bagged
in the States, are killed between fifteen and twenty paces; while I can
safely say, I never saw a full snipe r