spring woods gay and festive with their soft voices and fluttering
blue wings. I have seen thousands of them go through a beech wood,
like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting beechnuts. Those in the
rear would be constantly flying over those in front, so that the
effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and blue and
brown, rustling and murmuring as it went. One spring afternoon vast
flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when some
of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the
roadside. A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split
off and, with a downward wheel and rush, join those in the wood.
Presently I seized the old musket and ran out in the road, and then
crept up behind the wall, till only the width of the road separated
me from the swarms of fluttering pigeons. The air and the woods
were literally blue with them, and the ground seemed a yard deep
with them. I pointed my gun across the wall at the surging masses,
and then sat there spellbound. The sound of their wings and voices
filled my ears, and their numbers more than filled my eyes. Why
I did not shoot was never very clear to me. Maybe I thought the
world was all turning to pigeons, as they still came pouring down
from the heavens, and I did not want to break the spell. There I
sat waiting, waiting, with my eye looking along the gun-barrel,
till, suddenly, the mass rose like an explosion, and with a rush
and a roar they were gone. Then I came to my senses and with keen
mortification realized what an opportunity I had let slip. Such a
chance never came again, though the last great flight of pigeons did
not take place till 1875.

When I was about ten or twelve, a spell was put upon me by a red fox
in a similar way. The baying of a hound upon the mountain had drawn
me there, armed with the same old musket. It was a chilly day in