arrow out of the top of a pine tree and give you never a glimpse
of himself.

He lived most of the time on a ridge behind the 'Fales place,' an
abandoned farm on the east of the old post road. This was his
middle range, a place of dense coverts, bullbrier thickets and
sunny open spots among the ledges, where you might, with
good-luck, find him on special days at any season. But he had
all the migratory instincts of a Newfoundland caribou. In winter
he moved south, with twenty other grouse, to the foot of the
ridge, which dropped away into a succession of knolls and ravines
and sunny, well-protected little valleys, where food was plenty.
Here, fifty years ago, was the farm pasture; but now it had grown
up everywhere with thickets and berry patches, and wild apple
trees of the birds' planting. All the birds loved it in their
season; quail nested on its edges; and you could kick a brown
rabbit out of almost any of its decaying brush piles or hollow
moss-grown logs.

In the spring he crossed the ridge northward again, moving into
the still dark woods, where he had two or three wives with as
many broods of young partridges; all of whom, by the way, he
regarded with astonishing indifference.

Across the whole range--stealing silently out of the big woods,
brawling along the foot of the ridge and singing through the old
pasture--ran a brook that the old beech partridge seemed to love.
A hundred times I started him from its banks. You had only to
follow it any November morning before eight o'clock, and you
would be sure to find him. But why he haunted it at this