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I must here take leave to differ from the brilliant pioneer of American ornithology, as he has repeatedly been called; for I cannot admit the short-eared owl to be absolutely a winter bird of passage, although it may be such in a majority of instances, inasmuch as I have shot it, myself, on so many occasions during the summer months, and in such very different localities, that I cannot believe its presence to be merely accidental. I am convinced, on the contrary, that it quite frequently builds and rears its young in this district of country; for most part I imagine in reed beds and tussocky marsh meadows, to which they resort, I presume, in consequence of the abundant prey which such situations supply to them and to their youthful broods.

I have shot the short-eared owl in the State of Maine, in the month of July, while in pursuit of young herons, by certain marshy river sides and low woodlands in the vicinity of Brewer in Penobscot county; I have shot them in Salem and Gloucester counties, in New Jersey, on several different occasions, on the woodcock marsh meadows, and, lastly; I have shot them early in September on the Aux Canards river and snipe marshes in Canada West; certainly amounting in all to not less than twenty or five and twenty individuals, which I must consider as by far too great a number to be regarded as the mere exceptions that go to prove a rule.

The seasons and the distances at which these birds were found asunder, render it scarcely possible that they should have been merely accidental stragglers, detained casually in this country, as will often happen to migratory species, through the occurrence of slight wounds, or otherwise.

They must, I conceive, have undoubt

edly remained to breed, and had probably reared broods here; which is rendered more probable by the fact, that, on each of these occasions, I found six or eight birds in company, though I did not at the time pay any particular attention to the respective ages of the specimens.

To this I will only add, that whether in Europe or America, there is no more destructive bird to game than this Owl; and that particularly to quail, no falcon is nearly so dangerous an enemy.

For this reason, when I have a gun in my hand, I never spare a short-eared owl.

On one occasion, while hunting the extensive reedy and brushy meadows in the vicinity of Somerville, N. J., I observed a brace of owls beating the fields, rising and falling, turn and turn about, and quartering their ground as regularly as a brace of well-trained setter dogs. At last one of them pounced suddenly into the long reeds, and did not rise again; but on every side, with shrill and startled whirring of terrified wings, upsprung in dismay a large bevy of quail. To these the mate of the bird which had pounced gave immediate chase, and, within a hundred yards, struck down his victim also, and settled quietly into the grass to devour it.

Stealing up cautiously, I contrived to get a fair shot, and to avenge the murder of the first quail, whom I found headless and half devoured; but the report of my gun warned the second marauder of the wrath to come, and he escaped his doom. I had hoped to say a few words concerning the night owls and night hawks, in this paper; but its already somewhat extra-limital length imposes silence, and I must defer the night bird's shriek of warning to another hearing, and, it is to be devoutly wished, to a cooler month than this present.

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sonal qualities. Such a digression would be foreign to the purpose of this work. If his performance did not absolutely come up to the promise of the Major, still, I imagine, that officer was not the first military commander whose bulletin was more brilliant than his campaign. If he did not excel all other steeds in swiftness, he might be pardoned as a comfortable exception to the celerities of the fast age, in which he lived-though, indeed, at that time it was but just getting its speed up. If he did stumble a little, now and then, let the biped that hath never done the same thing, and with less provocation, and on a smoother road, throw the first stone at poor Turk. I remember him with emotions of tenderness, for he is associated with the beginning of a charming acquaintanceship, and of a succession of as charming rides, that lovely summer, through a country as lovely, in my eyes, as the summer itself.

Philosophers differ as to the very most advantageous position in which one can be placed in relation to a charming young lady, on whom one has no specific objection to making an agreeable impression. Some think that a walk "by moon or glittering starlight" is the very best invention that the wit of man hath ever hit upon. Other some, that the corner of a blazing wood-fire, on a winter's evening, is indeed "a coign of vantage," if rightly improved by a judicious mind.

There

are who hold that a sleigh-ride, in a clear, cold, crackling winter's night, is not incapable of being turned to a good account, with all its manifold exhilarations and excitations. And there are not wanting who maintain that a ball-room, with all its heat, and crush and bustle,

"When music softens and when dancing fires," furnishes that exact combination of proximity and isolation which constitutes the most congenial atmosphere for civilized love to grow in, from the first incipiency of flirtation to the final desperation of proposal. There was much to be said in behalf of this theory in the days before the incursions of barbarian dances had shaken the institutions of civilized ball-rooms to their foundations. The country dances of our ancestors, and the quadrilles of our own times, were not unfavourable to the gentle flutterings of the hovering loves. But it must be a stout cupid, indeed, of a robust constitution and a hardy disposition, that can stand up before the frantic rush of a polka or redowa, and not be swept away into utter annihilation by the very tempest and whirlwind of those whisking petticoats. But it is my notion that a tête à tête ride on horseback, through

lonely lanes and solitary wood-paths, is not the worst way of being brought into confidential communications with a charm ing young woman. Sometimes, you know, one cannot avoid guiding her bridle-hand in some emergent difficulty, and cases have come to my knowledge, in which an enlightened philanthropy could not be satisfied without supporting her jimp waist with a sustaining arm, in narrow and perilous passes. A painful and dangerous position, indeed; but then, you must allow, one could not suffer her to run the risk of falling from her horse. I wonder the Humane Society does not reward such heroic risks by the awarding of gold medals to the virtuous adventurer. Merely plunging into the water to pull out a stupid, blundering man, or boy, were a safe and easy feat in the comparison.

My Monday's ride with Colonel Allerton and his daughter was blessed to me in this very form and manner. Finding that I was a tolerable horseman, and withal a very modest and discreet youth, the Colonel proposed to me that I should accompany the young lady in her rides during the rest of the week, which, as he had previously informed me, he should be obliged to pass in Boston."

"And, by-the-by," said he, in reply to my blushing acceptance of his proposition, "by-the-by. I think you had better make use of my Prince, here, I fancy he will carry you better than the beast you have under you. Isn't that the horse Grimes wanted me to buy?"

"The horse you wanted to buy of him, rather, I replied, laughing, "for that was the statement the Major made to me of the case."

"Was it, indeed!" he answered laughing in his turn, "I certainly ought to have wanted to buy him if he had had half the virtues vouched for him by the Major, and he would have been cheap at twice the price. But it was he proposed the trade, and he had the impudence to ask three hundred dollars for him."

"So I inferred from what dropped from him afterwards," said I, "but your refusal, sir, raised you many degrees in his estimation. He thinks you a Doctor in the science he esteems the highest of all, the science of horseflesh."

"I could hardly help picking up the elements," he replied, "considering I was for more than twenty years in a cavalry regiment. I do not profess to be a Doctor, or even a Master in the Art; but I know enough to know that such a brute as that is not worth the half of three hundred dollars.

The next day, Colonel Allerton departed for Boston, and in the afternoon I

walked over to Woodside and found Miss Eleanor all ready waiting for me, her Fairy and her father's Prince pawing the gravel before the hall door. We were soon in the saddle, and as she was perfectly well acquainted with the country for ten miles round, we were not long in reaching as charming a winding and wooded by-road as any county could furnish. The mania for improvement, so deeply seated in the character of New England; and which, at the beginning of this century, found its relief in cutting infinitely extended straight lines of turnpike roads in every direction over the country, had spared this remote corner of its domain. Even the road to Haverford, by which I had journeyed to Wensley, was the Old Road, which, avoiding the turnpike, (as the road itself is invariably called in New England), meandered about from village to village, according as the early settlers had arranged the division of the soil, when they first helped themselves to it. And so the by-roads, through which the course lay, wound themselves around the homesteads and out-lying fields of the farmers, or swept by the skirts of their woodlands, (woodlots they call them there), like Schiller's river

"Honoring the holy bounds of the property."

"Is this ride anything like those you had in Devonshire, Miss Allerton ?" I enquired of my fair companion, as we plunged into a depth of wood, thick with under-brush, the branches of the pines almost making the road impassable for two riding abreast, so broad and long did they stretch themselves, "you are too civilized there, I take it, to permit such impediments as these to cross your path."

"Yes," she replied, "England has been inhabited rather too long to have left many such primitive scenes as this,—at least, in the South where I have mostly lived. I never saw that, for instance," she said, pointing with her riding-whip to the tangled under-brush which choked up the passages between the trunks of the trees, I never saw anything like that, till I came here.

"And you wish it away, as a deformity, I suppose," said I.

"No, not as a deformity," she replied, "it is characterestic of an aboriginal wood, as I suppose this really is, for though the ancestors of these trees may have been cut away once or twice, I fancy it has never been anything but a forest,—and it is picturesque and beautiful in itself. But I own I long for an opening now and then under the trees, by which one might escape from the beaten road, like a damsel

or knight of Faery in quest of adventures."

"We must first find a well-disposed magician or benevolent enchantress to clear our way for us," I answered, "for I fear that we shall never find the undergrowth cleared away by any Yankee until the caitiff is ready to hew down the trees too, as, indeed, he is but too wellinclined to do. We are but beginning to outgrow the antipathy which our fathers instilled into us against trees and Indians. As they grow scarce we may grow merciful to the aborigines of both kinds."

Talking thus we rode along and my companion entertained me with descriptions of the neighborhood of Wolford Hall and the differences between those scenes of ancient civilization and exact culture and the rough and half-reclaimed country around us. Presently she drew rein at a narrow opening into the forest, which the wood-cutters might be supposed to have made for their own occasions.

"Come," said she, "what say you to trying our luck down that path? Who knows but it may lead us to some adventure. I know all these roads by heart. and, if you will back me, I will try and find out a new one."

"I imagine you will find it a passage, like those in the long story, that leads to nothing," I answered, "but still if you are for the trial I'll not fail you. Only, let me have the honour of leading the van and facing the perils of the enterprise first, as becomes a good knight."

I turned my horse's head for the purpose of preceding her, and in the first place, of removing two or three bars which crossed the entrance. But she was too quick for me. Giving her mare a smart blow with her riding-whip, like another Di Vernon, she made her leap the low fence and so secured the lead, for the path-way was too narrow to admit of my passing her. Now, though I was a tolerable horseman, as I have already said, I had had no particular experience in leaping fences, that being a freedom in which we are not much indulged in this land of liberty. But, still, like Frank Osbaldistone, I was piqued to show my horsemanship by such an example and, accordingly pressed my steed to the point, not without a secret misgiving that I might find myself performing a mathematical curve of some unknown description over his head. It was lucky for me that I was backing Prince at this critical moment, for I should be sorry to have put Turk up to such a trial of his mettle. But Prince took the fence as if he were used to much greater feats than this and thought but little of it. So I followed

my fair leader, who shook her golden curls, which had escaped from under the control of her riding-cap, and shot me through-and-through with her laughing glances, as she looked back at me.

And,

She was in the highest spirits, and talked and laughed in a most bewitching manner. We could not proceed very rapidly, and, as I followed in her track, I had an excellent opportunity of admiring her firm, erect figure and the admirable manner in which she sat on her horse. Still she often turned her face to me and chatted away with me in the liveliest way possible. The absence of mind which I had observed at my first interview, and of which there had been an occasional trace at the few times I had seen her since, was entirely gone. The exhilaration of the fine clear sky; the delicious air, fragrant with the spicy smell of the pines, and growing cool as the sun dipped lower and lower; the excitement of the exercise joined to the scene of pleasure which must always, I suppose, attend an exploring expedition, on however minute a scale,all united to make her a totally different creature from what I had imagined her from my previous observations. possibly, it might have been that the companionship of the only young creature she had seen for so many months, helped to unlock her spirits by the secret magic of youthful sympathy. She must have discerned that I was a harmless, as well as a sheepish youth, without the least mixture of the lady-killer in my composition. She could not but know that I admired her extremely, and in that desert even the admiration of a College lad like me, was something. Moreover, I had made no demonstrations of a love-making nature. I was by far too modest for that, had I had any constitutional tendency to that complaint, or rather vice. Making love, indeed! A vile phrase! As bad as that of "falling in love," which Yorick justly reprobates as implying that "love is something beneath a man!" No, no! Love is none of your confounded manufactures. It is an indigenous growth. You cannot make it. You may tend and cherish and foster, it and sit in its shadow, and crown yourself with its blossoms, and feast upon its fruits unto everlasting life. But you can no more make it, than you can make a rose-tree or a grape-vine.

And now I suppose my readers would like to know whether this magic growth had sprung up in my heart, and taken possession of me. A very natural curiosity, I admit, but one which I hardly think it time to satisfy. I fully concede the reciprocal rights and duties of this Confessional, of which these lines, at

which the reader looks and listens to me, may represent the bars or lattice, and shall be ready to make a clean breast of it in due time. Perhaps I am not, at this point of my narrative, in a sufficiently penitential frame of mind. Possibly; I am not clear in my own mind how it was with me at that precise point of time. You know that my acquaintance with her was very young. "Ah, yes!" you will reply, "and so is Dan Cupid very young, too. We all know from authentic story, if not from our own experience, we all know that he springs to life, all armed, at a single glance of an eye!" I admit the general proposition; but, then, I have already assured you that she had not shown the faintest symptom of falling in love with me. But here you shake your heads with one consent, and agree that that is nothing to the purpose. Why, what would become of the whole tribe of novel-writers and story-tellers if the course of true love ran smooth all the time? Are they not obliged to cast about, every mother's son of them, for sticks and stones to throw into the stream, so as to make it chafe and murmur the more musically rough in its passage to the tranquil lake of matrimony, which they have spread out to receive it, at last? This, again, I cannot gainsay. But, then, I have not told you yet the fatal truth, that she must have been at least a year, if not two years, older than I! I positively looked upon her with a certain sensation of respect for her advanced years, and whatever sentiment I entertained for her, it was qualified by a feeling of reverence for her age. I think she must have been as much as twenty. And here, once more, you all look arch and knowing, and ask me if I don't know that a man always falls in love, for the first time, with a woman older than himself? You are right, again, my friends. Your observation is founded in the Nature of Things, and is just as well as original. But, then, how do you know that it was the first time? Have I opened to you the seals of all the books of my whole past history? Did I tell you who it was that I used to lift off her horse, when it was on the very tip of my tongue, when narrating one of the most surprising adventures of this true history? If you only patiently bide your times, you will be told all things that are fit and edifying for you to know.

In this manner we fared onwards, finding it, very often, hard enough to keep our saddles, so difficult was it in places to make our way good through the boughs interlacing across our pathway. Presently, however, she called cheerily

to me, to make haste after her, for she had come within sight of land. I was soon by her side, and found that our narrow way emptied, so to speak, into a wide clearing, which showed signs of having been cultivated, though then in a sluggardly condition. At intervals charred stumps raised themselves above the level of the field, but they looked as if the rains of many summers and the snows of many winters had been blanching their grim skeletons, since they were first submitted to the ordeal of fire. But the greater part of the plain was perfectly cleared, and furnished a sufficiently hard surface for riding purposes. It was nearly surrounded by wooded hills, the pine trees sloping upwards to the hill-tops, and looking like spectators in some vast amphitheatre, peering over one another's heads at the arena in which we were the sole actors.

"A race! a race!" she exclaimed, and, suiting the action to the word, she put her mare to her speed, and I was not slow to do the same good office by Prince. The horses sprung forward over the turf in the direction of the only opening in the amphitheatre of hills, which appeared to be about a quarter of a mile distant.

My horse was much stronger and heavier than hers, and in a long run he would, undoubtedly, have had the advantage. But for a short distance Fairy was more than a match for him, and, besides, her mistress was perfectly well acquainted with her ways, and could command her best speed as I could not well do the first time I had ever been upon Prince's back. So my companion had fairly the start of me, and was entering the gap in the hills, which was the goal at which we aimed, when I had not cleared much more than two-thirds of the distance. She was hid from me for an instant by the shape of the ground, and the next moment I was horror-stricken to hear a sudden splash and scream from the direction where she had disappeared. I struck my spurs "up to the rowel-head" into the sides of my horse, who leapt forward as if intelligent of the distress, and in a minute I was on the spot from which the cry came. The first glance showed the nature and occasion of the accident. The Quasheen, which washed the wood on that side, was so near the opening at which I had lost sight of my companion, that, before she could check her speed, her horse carried her into the middle of the stream, where, by the suddenness of the shock, she lost her seat and was plunged in the river.

The stream, though not wide, was deep, and quite sufficient to drown a stouter

person than Miss Allerton. But, though she had lost her seat she had not lost her presence of mind, and she held fast by Fairy's mane, being well assured that she would bring her through her peril. I threw myself from my horse and was already in the river when my hopes of being the preserver of my fair charge were unexpectedly disappointed. A man suddenly stept into the river opposite where she was (for Fairy had swam a little way down the stream), and seizing Miss Allerton by her floating riding habit, drew her towards him and then carried her in his arms to the landing-place whence she had made her plunge.

O, shouldn't I have liked to have killed him at that moment! And then, to have to be obliged to thank him for having robbed me of my unquestionable prerogative! But any such emotions as these were soon put to flight by the effect which her rescuer produced upon Miss Allerton as soon as she fairly recovered herself enough to look at him-which was as soon as he set her, dripping like a Naiad, upon her feet. Clearly, all recollection of her recent danger, and of her obligation to the man before her was lost in stronger emotions. She seemed struck mute with amazement and to be pale with some yet stronger passion. It seemed to me that it looked like fear. The man was obviously a gentleman, though he was roughly, dressed for trout-fishing, in a coarse sailor's jacket, boots which came up above his knees and a weather-beaten broad-brimmed hat. His face was as pale as hers, but calm with a calmness that concealed deep feelings of some sort. In the surprise and suddenness of the whole thing I could not read his features very accurately; but, as I remembered them afterwards, it seemed to me that they conveyed a strange expression of exultation and defiance, with some deeper passion under all, but I could not make out whether it were love or hate. I remember I thought it could hardly be the first. He must have long since survived that passion at the age he had reached. He was, probably, about five or six and thirty.

As soon as Miss Allerton could command her voice, she said to him, with a tone in which was mingled no gratitude for the service he had done her, but only coldness and aversion, and as it still seemed to me, some dash of terror, "And so you have followed us hither, too!"

"You I have followed hither, and will follow farther than this, as you might have guessed. But," he paused, and turning to me, said, “perhaps this young gentleman will be good enough to catch your

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