stiffening wings still beat his sides spasmodically. He had been
scared-up in the neighboring woods, frightened by some hunter out
of his native coverts. When he reached the unknown open places he
was more frightened still and, as a frightened grouse always
flies straight, he had driven like a bolt through the schoolhouse
window, killing himself by the impact.

Rule-of-three and cube root and the unmapped wilderness of
partial payments have left but scant impression on one of those
pupils, at least; but a bird that could wake up a drowsy
schoolroom and bring out a living lesson, full of life and
interest and the subtile call of the woods, from a drowsy teacher
who studied law by night, but never his boys by day,--that was a
bird to be respected. I have studied him with keener interest
ever since.

Yet however much you study the grouse, you learn little except
how wild he is. Occasionally, when you are still in the woods and
a grouse walks up to your hiding place, you get a fair glimpse
and an idea or two; but he soon discovers you, and draws himself
up straight as a string and watches you for five minutes without
stirring or even winking. Then, outdone at his own game, he
glides away. A rustle of little feet on leaves, a faint kwit-kwit
with a question in it, and he is gone. Nor will he come back,
like the fox, to watch from the other side and find out what you
are.

Civilization, in its first advances, is good to the grouse,
providing him with an abundance of food and driving away his
enemies. Grouse are always more numerous about settlements than