as stationary as the scattered trees and cattle, and about fifteen yards distant.  Every feature and marking of the “chicken,” or pinnated grouse, was as distinct to the eye as though, instead of making thirty-two miles an hour, he were posing for his photograph.  For full two hundred yards he sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge.  How much longer the match had lasted I could not say.  He must have got up near the engine—­of course losing some time in the act of rising—­and fallen back gradually to my place, which was in a rear car.  But when a schedule for birds comes to be framed, it is safe to set down Tetrao cupido at about the speed above named.  Timed from a rail-car, that is; for, looked at over a gun, he seems to move five times as fast.  The double-barrel is a powerful binocular.

Steam, then, soon carries us to the resort of the lost truants, who have travelled with the lines of longitude by guides and tracks over that invisible road as unerring as those of the railway.  We shall find them in close companionship with friends unknown in our latitude, whose abiding-places are at the South, as those left behind are fixed dwellers at the North.

From the window at which I sit on this morning late in January and this parallel of thirty degrees,—­window open, as well as the door, for no norther is on duty to-day,—­I see flocks of our familiar redwings, cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees.  But they have a crony never seen by us.  This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his dead-reckoning when a wind is on.  His wife is a sober-looking lady in a suit of steel-gray, and the pair are quite conspicuous among their winter guests.  The latter are far less shy than we are accustomed to find them, a majority being young in their first season and with little or no experience of human guile.  No one cares to shoot them, in the abundance of larger game, and the absence of stones from the fat prairie-soil places them out of danger from the small boy.  Their only foe is the hawk, who levies blackmail on them as coolly and regularly as any other plumed cateran.  Partly, perhaps, by reason of this outside pressure, they are cheek by jowl with the poultry,—­the cow-bunting, which is the pet prey of the hawk, following them into the back porch and insisting sometimes on breakfasting with Tray,—­or rather with Legion, for that is the name of the Texas dog.  In this familiarity they are approached, though not equalled, by that more home-staying bird the meadow-lark, who is here a dweller of the lawn and garden and adds his mellow