In some shape or form he recognises that he only shoots inside it by favour, even if that favour till quite lately could be had for the asking; whereas on a mountain or a prairie, though it might be just as much private property, he would have no such feeling. The quail, therefore, being the only indigenous game-bird of the inclosed portions of older America, occupies a peculiar position.

The home of the quail, so far as the east of the Mississippi is concerned, lies mostly in the old SlaveStates. Though found here and there in the Northern and North-eastern States, and till recently in Western Canada, it is only from Maryland southwards that the birds are numerous enough to be a leading item in the sportsman's calendar. Small farms and clean farming, acting in concert with harder winters and a much denser population, have almost extirpated the quail from the regions north of the Susquehanna River. The harvest, moreover, in the North is late, and no great growth of weeds has time before the early frosts to spring up on the clean stubbles as a covert for the birds in autumn. Throughout all the South, on the other hand, the grain is cut late in June or early in July. The long ensuing period of heat and showers covers the stubbles with a growth of annual weeds, which by the autumn are knee high, a sea of green from fence to fence. After the first two or three night frosts these become brown and brittle, and invite the now fairly grown coveys to come out and feed on the seed which bursts from them. These vast fields of "rag-weed" that, like a russet carpet, cover the stubbles of the Southern States in later autumn from Maryland to Georgia, are pretty much to the American sportsman what the turnips are to his English cousin.

In Virginia, as indeed in other Southern States, the clinging of the earlier English settlers to the names and forms of the life they left behind

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them still lingers in their sporting phraseology. The ruffed grouse with them is still the pheasant. The quail is no quail but still a partridge, nay, more than that, he is distinguished like his English prototype by the significant title of "bird.' By a sort of tacit confession he thus takes precedence of all other feathered fowl. Your Southerner knows nothing about "bevies of quail." The expression is no doubt the orthodox one, but he talks as autumn approaches with a truly British proprietory pride of his coveys of birds."

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The Virginian quail is regarded by naturalists as standing so completely midway between the quail and the partridge families that he may be classed with either. In size he is much larger than his European namesake, though barely two-thirds the weight of an English partridge; his habits and arrangements, domestic and otherwise, are for general purposes of description those of the latter. I venture to think, however, if it be not sacrilege to say so, that the pursuit of the English bird is somewhat tame after a long devotion to the dashing little Virginian. continuous tramp of turnip-fields in line, unenlivened by the inspiring companionship of the pointer or the setter, hangs a bit heavy after the exhilarating variety of quail-shooting; the want of variety not only in the nature of the covert from which the game spring, but also comparatively speaking in the nature of the shot afforded, is in striking contrast to the conditions of American quail-shooting. Both the partridge and the grouse pass rapidly from the stage in which they are easily killed to that in which they become unapproachable. The Virginian quail is never easy to kill, but he lies to dogs from the first day of the season to the last. In most parts of England the pointer and the setter have been abandoned as useless. In some they are tolerated for a short time as pleasing and ornamental, if not necessary, adjuncts. Here and

there in rough corners they are still the genuine friend of the sportsman. But in hunting the Virginian quail dogs are an absolute necessity. To attempt the sport without them would not merely rob it of one of its great charms, but it would make ordinary success impossible. Memories of quailshooting are inseparably bound up with the feats and performances of departed canine favourites. But even in the halcyon days of the pointer and the ragged stubbles the surface of the country was hardly so favourable for producing perfection of sport as that of those regions where the Virginian quail can be most pleasantly pursued to-day. Nor has our bird that fertility of resource, that bullet-swiftness of flight, that readiness to seek any and every sort of covert which calls out the highest qualities in the dogs and demands the greatest smartness with the gun. With the big-game hunter who affects to despise English sports we have no sympathy whatever. comparison into which we have somewhat unwittingly dropped is between two distinctly domestic sports. Quailshooting in the older states has no connection whatever with the camp fire and the bivouac. As the sportsman fires his last shot against a background of purple sunset sky, he can probably see the lights beginning to twinkle from some substantial mansion where he is domiciled. He will possibly even discuss his well-earned supper beneath the portraits of grim old gentlemen in wigs and ruffles, who shot partridges (not quail if you please) with flint fowling-pieces on these self-same stubbles a century ago.

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The prairie-chicken, or pinnated grouse, calls the sportsman out in early August, when the thermometer may be standing at ninety-two degrees in the shade, and the mosquitoes springing from the prairie grass hover in swarms around his neck and ears. Duckshooting, for the majority of Eastern sportsmen at any rate, means the opposite extreme; inaction, cramped

quarters, and very often an unpleasantly low temperature. Enthu

siasm may be, and is, much more than proof against such conditions, but the conditions taken by themselves are not desirable. Now quail-shooting, while it demands all the exertion that the most muscular sportsman can desire and the maximum of skill, is generally carried on in circumstances of scenery and climate that are in themselves a joy. For the bird waits to mature till the crisp frosty nights of October have laid their hand upon the greenery of the Southern summer: till the gorgeous colouring of autumn a colouring that in those altitudes baffles the powers of either pen or brush is creeping southward from the Potomac river over field and forest.

Though by the law of most districts the birds are available for the sportsman by the middle of October, it is the month of November that is especially dear to him. A few wet days and a few more frosts have stripped the weeds and denuded the thickets not of all their leaves, but of their abundant luxuriance. Scent, that important factor in quail - shooting, lies strong upon the moist, cool uplands. The woods, if they have lost that splendour whose mere contemplation a week or two earlier would atone for an inferior bag, are no longer harbours of safe refuge for the frightened coveys, but are bare enough of leaves to make the sportsman's chance among them at least equal to that of the birds. With November too in Virginia comes the Indian summer. Nowhere, perhaps, in America does that period of balmy peace linger so long and so lovingly as in the Old Dominion. Winds and rains and frosts, that have seemed to threaten winter and caused good folks to hurry about their Christmas firewood, passaway like an ugly dream and are forgotten in the great lull that follows. Earth, having matured her fruits, seems to relapse into a profound repose before facing the storms of winter. The very winds sleep. The

red and golden leaves still upon the trees, that one rude blast would dissipate, trace themselves unmoved by even a ripple of air against the blue and cloudless sky. For days and weeks the atmosphere is fresh and balmy, but so still that the thin columns of smoke which rise up from homestead or tobacco-house form moveless clouds in mid-air far and wide upon the landscape. The silence is so great that even the acorns and chestnuts falling from the forest trees upon the leafy ground make sharp and loud reports, while at night the sky twinkles with a myriad stars and a brilliant moon streaming over woods and fields wraps the land in a light paler and softer than but almost as clear as the light of day.

Such very often is the November, or a greater part of the November, to which the Virginian quail - shooter looks forward, and December not unfrequently is scarcely less enjoyable. The surface of the country and the growth that covers it are admirably adapted for shooting over with dogs-woodland and stubble, bare pastures and waving sedge-fields alternate upon the uplands. In the valleys more stubbles and fields of stripped corn-stalks, threaded this way and that by running streams or transverse drains overgrown with brush, afford not only refuge for the scattered birds but often a feeding ground for the coveys. The charm of the quail is his absolute unconventionality. It is true you will generally find your covey among the dark "rag-weed" that clothes the wheat stubbles knee-deep, or among the straw-coloured "hens'-nest grass that mats itself over the thin stalks of the oat fields; but the exceptions are numerous, and the influence of the weather, time of day, and period of the season on the habits of the bird himself are so great, and his choice of cover so varied, that there is the greatest scope for experience and judgment in his pursuit. In planning a campaign for the day, it is upon wheat-stubbles that the mind chiefly

dwells. It is there you count upon finding birds; elsewhere you may or may not find them, but the dark brittle "rag-weed" is an almost certain "draw." The spirits of the most exhausted sportsman rise as he clambers over the rickety snake-fence that divides the happy hunting - ground from the bare stretch of sprouting wheat over which he has just tramped; the most weary dog bounds forward then with renewed vigour, and sweeps backwards and forwards over the brown expanse with the energy of early morning. If quail shooting requires experience in the man, it is astonishing what difference it makes in the dog. The partridges in a turnip-field are as likely to be in one part as another. There is nothing for it but for both men and dogs to go methodically to work. But the Southern stubbles, though uniform enough to the eye of the novice, have their likely and unlikely spots that at once strike not only the eye of the experienced sportsman but of his experienced canine assistants also. good quail-pointer of many seasons, is, to my thinking, an animal whose sagacity in matters of fertility and cunning is unmatched. The brown undulating weed-covered field, which, I have said, to the sportsman not conversant in this especial art has such a uniform appearance, to an old dog like this presents a much more diversified picture. His younger kennel-companions, or dogs broken in other countries, will be ranging far and wide in the most orthodox manner, trusting entirely to their noses and their legs; but our old friend will have trotted leisurely to some richer and darker streak among the weeds, to the sunny side of some ravine or to the banks of some watercourse, and be rigidly and immovably fixed, with straining eyes and quivering nostrils, before a frightened and huddling covey ere the puppies and the strangers have made a single turn apiece.

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In what the Northern sportsmen call a "bevy of quail," Southerners a