and of course all the boys from six years old up.  They surround the field and set it on fire in many places, leaving small openings for the game to dash out among the motley assembly.  I have seen quail fly out of the burning grass with flaming particles still attached to them.  They alight on the burnt ground too bewildered to fly again and the boys and dogs pick them up.  Crazed rabbits try the gauntlet amidst the barking curs, shouting negroes and popping guns, but death is sure and quick.  The few quail that may escape have no refuge from the hawks and nothing to eat, so every battue of this kind marks the absolute end of the birds in one vicinity; and the next day the darkies repeat the performance elsewhere.

At this season of the year, the first of May, the blacks are putting in some of their one hundred working days while the single breech-loader rusts in the chimney corner.  Surely the few birds that have escaped the foray of the “gang,” lived through the hungry days, and survived their burned homes can now call “Bob White” and mate in peace.  But school is out and the summer sun is putting new life into the bare feet of the half-grown boys, and the halfbreed bird dogs are busier than they were even in winter.  The young rabbits are killed before they get out of the nest, and the quail eggs must be hidden rarely well that escape both the eyes of the boys and the noses of the dogs.  After all it is not surprising that but three bevies remained of the sixty.  Doubtless they would not, except that nature is very kind to her own in the sunny South.

Not every white man in the South is a sportsman or even a shooter; many are purely business men who have said let the “nigger” do as he likes so long as he raises cotton and buys our goods.  But Dixie has her full share of true men of the out-of-doors and they have sworn in downright Southern fashion that this thing has got to end.  Nevertheless their problem is deep and puzzling.  In Alabama they made an effort and a beginning.  They asked for a law requiring every man to obtain written permission before entering the lands of another to hunt and shoot; they asked for a resident license law taxing every gun not less than five dollars a year; for a shortened season, a bag limit, and a complete system of State wardens.  Unfortunately, a lot of white farmers were in the same range as the blacks, and being hit, too, they raised a great outcry.  The result was that the Alabama sportsmen got everything they asked for except the foundation of the structure they were trying to build, the high resident license or gun tax which alone could have shut out three dollar guns and saved the remnant of the game.  Under the new law the sale of game was forbidden, neither could it be shipped out of the State alive or dead; the ever popular non-resident license was provided for; the season was shortened and the bag limited; the office of State game warden was created with