displaying beautiful iridescent colors as they moved their necks backward and forward when we went very near them.  Every shotgun was aimed at them and everybody feasted on pigeon pies, and not a few of the settlers feasted also on the beauty of the wonderful birds.  The breast of the male is a fine rosy red, the lower part of the neck behind and along the sides changing from the red of the breast to gold, emerald green and rich crimson.  The general color of the upper parts is grayish blue, the under parts white.  The extreme length of the bird is about seventeen inches; the finely modeled slender tail about eight inches, and extent of wings twenty-four inches.  The females are scarcely less beautiful.  “Oh, what bonnie, bonnie birds!” we exclaimed over the first that fell into our hands.  “Oh, what colors!  Look at their breasts, bonnie as roses, and at their necks aglow wi’ every color juist like the wonderfu’ wood ducks.  Oh, the bonnie, bonnie creatures, they beat a’!  Where did they a’ come fra, and where are they a’ gan?  It’s awfu’ like a sin to kill them!” To this some smug, practical old sinner would remark:  “Aye, it’s a peety, as ye say, to kill the bonnie things, but they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were sent to God’s chosen people, the Israelites, when they were starving in the desert ayont the Red Sea.  And I must confess that meat was never put up in neater, handsomer-painted packages.”

In the New England and Canada woods beechnuts were their best and most abundant food, farther north, cranberries and huckleberries.  After everything was cleaned up in the north and winter was coming on, they went south for rice, corn, acorns, haws, wild grapes, crab-apples, sparkle-berries, etc.  They seemed to require more than half of the continent for feeding-grounds, moving from one table to another, field to field, forest to forest, finding something ripe and wholesome all the year round.  In going south in the fine Indian-summer weather they flew high and followed one another, though the head of the flock might be hundreds of miles in advance.  But against head winds they took advantage of the inequalities of the ground, flying comparatively low.  All followed the leader’s ups and downs over hill and dale though far out of sight, never hesitating at any turn of the way, vertical or horizontal that the leaders had taken, though the largest flocks stretched across several States, and belts of different kinds of weather.

There were no roosting-or breeding-places near our farm, and I never saw any of them until long after the great flocks were exterminated.  I therefore quote, from Audubon’s and Pokagon’s vivid descriptions.

“Toward evening,” Audubon says, “they depart for the roosting-place, which may be hundreds of miles distant.  One on the banks of Green River, Kentucky, was over three miles wide and forty long.”