Still, those which breed with us in the United States, and even in the Canadas, are but as drops of water to an ocean, to those which rush on the untiring pinions moved by amatory instinct to the far breeding grounds of Labrador, Symsonia, and Boothia Felix, where it is _supposed_ they resort to rear their young in hyperborean solitude, thence to reissue, in the summer and the earlier autumn, and re-populate our midland meadows. In the neighborhood of Amherstburg, Canada west, they appear very early; often in February of mild seasons, always in March; and there may breed, and remain until banished by severe cold. I shot one there myself last autumn, the last bird of the season, very late in November, I believe on the 28th or 29th; and with the plover, the Hudsonian godwit, and the Esquimaux curlew, they were seen there this spring in the first days of March. Around Quebec, I have shot English snipe on the uplands, in fallow fields and rushy pastures—for the grass in the morasses does not begin to shoot in those far northern latitudes, so as to afford them shelter, until much later in the year—in the end of April and the beginning of May; but they arrive there only by small scattered whisps, or single birds, tarry a few short days, and flit onward to their unknown destination. This, then, is their mystery—that in no known land are they perennial; in no ascertained region—so far as I can learn—are they positively known to breed in the vast concourses which must breed somewhere, in order to supply the prodigious flights which issue yearly from the northern regions of three continents, Europe, America, and Asia, to fill the warmer countries, and to be slaughtered literally by myriads, season after season, without undergoing much if any visible diminution of numbers. Ever, in all places, in all countries, in all continents, which they visit in spring, they are seen pressing northward still, from March until May; no one being able to say here ends their tide of emigration, this is their chosen resting place. Their breeding season is from the middle of May to the beginning of July; on the 4th of which month I have shot young birds, with the pin-feathers undeveloped, as large as the parents—these birds having been hatched on the ground whereon I killed them. Indeed, it is my opinion, that all birds which tarry in our latitudes beyond the 10th of May, either _do_ breed with us, or would do so but for the persecution of the pot-hunter—all which intend to steer farther north having departed ere that time.