l the other
quail except the Commodore's which, though the dogs trailed him well,
and worked like Trojans, they could not for their lives make out.

After this little rally they went down to the alders by the stream-side,
and had enough to do, till it was growing rapidly too dark to shoot--for
the woodcock were very plentiful--it was sweet ground, too, not for
feeding only, but for lying, and that, as Harry pointed out, is a great
thing in the autumn.

The grass was short and still rich under foot, although it froze hard
every night; but all along the brook's marge there were many small oozy
bubbling springlets, which it required a stinging night to congeal; and
round these the ground was poached up by the cattle, and laid bare in
spots of deep, soft, black loam; and the innumerable chalkings told the
experienced eye at half a glance, that, where they laid up for the night
soever, here was their feeding ground, and here it had been through the
autumn.

But this was not all, for at every ten or twenty paces was a dense tuft
of willow bushes, growing for the most part upon the higher knolls where
it was dry and sunny, their roots heaped round with drift wood, from the
decay of which had shot up a dense tangled growth of cat-briers. In
these the birds were lying, all but some five or six which had run out
to feed, and were flushed, fat and large, and lazy, quite in the open
meadow.

"They stay here later," Harry said, as they bagged the last bird, which,
be it observed, was the twenty-seventh, "than any where I know. Here I
have killed them when there was ice thicker than a dollar on all the
waters round about, and when you might see a thin and smoke-like mist
boiling up from each springlet. Kill them all off to-day, and you will
find a dozen fresh birds here to-morrow, and so on for a fortnight--they
come down from the high ground as it gets too cold for them to endure
their high and rarified atmosphere, and congregate hither!"

"And why not more in number at a time?" asked A---.

"Ay! there we are in the dark--we do not know sufficiently the habits of
the bird to speak with certainty. I do not think they are pugnacious,
and yet you never find more on a feeding ground than it will well
accommodate for many days, nay weeks, together. One might imagine that
their migrations would be made en masse, that all the birds upon these
neighboring hills would crowd down to this spot together, and feed here
till it was exhaust