But think, ye snow-bound, of the state of things implied in this embarrassment of riches,—­of a mid-winter table balanced between such a choice, or, better, balanced by the adoption of both, one at each end!  Nor would this be near telling the whole story.  Excluding fur and sticking to feather, we have a wide range beyond.  The larger birds we may begin on, very moderately, with crane-steak, a transverse section of our stately but distant friend the sand-hill.  That is the form in which he is thought to appear to best advantage.  By the time you have circumvented him by circumscribing him in the gradually narrowing circuit of a buggy,—­for stalking him, unless in higher grass than is common at this season, is but vexation of spirit,—­you will feel vicious enough to eat him in any shape.  His brother, the beautiful white bugler, you will hardly meet at dinner, he being the shyest of his kind.  A Canada goose—­not the tough and fishy bird of the Northern coast, but grain- and grass-fed from fledging-time—­is tender, delicate, and everyway presentable.  From the back upper gallery that looks upon the prairie you are likely to see a company or battalion of his brethren, their long black necks and white ties “dressing” capitally in line, and their invisible legs doing the goose-step as the inventors of that classic manoeuvre ought to do it.  This bird seems to affect the militaire in all his movements.  What can be more regular than the wedge, like that so common in tactical history, in which he begins his march, moving in “a column of attack upon the pole”?  Even when startled and put to flight, he goes off smoothly and quietly, company-front.  In foraging he is strictly systematic, and never forgets to set sentinels.  We cannot fail to respect him while doing him the last honors.  Of not inferior claim is his prairie chum and remote cousin the mallard.  They are not often in close companionship, though I have seen a dozen and a half of each rise from the border and the bosom of a pond forty yards across,—­one loving the open, and the other taking repose, if not food, upon the water.  That there should be ponds upon these prairies is as striking to one accustomed to hill and dale as that so unpromising a surface should so teem with life.  The prairie is as flat as if cast like plate-glass and rolled out,—­only the table is slightly tilted toward the Gulf at the rate of two or three hundred feet in a hundred miles.  At night you may see the head-light of an engine fifteen miles away, like a low star that you wonder does not rise.  It grows slowly in size, a Sirius, a Venus, a moon, as though the earth had stopped rotating and adopted a direct motion toward the heavenly bodies.  Early on fine mornings the horizon gets tired, as it were, of being suppressed, and looms up in a mirage, with an outfit of imaged trees and hills reflected in an imaginary lake,—­a pictured protest of Nature against monotony.  There are local depressions, nevertheless, which you would not believe in but for