November is upon us—hearty, brown, healthful November, harbinger of his best joys to the ardent sportsman, and best beloved to him of all the months of the great annual cycle; November, with its clear, bracing, western breezes; its sun, less burning, but how far more beautiful than that of fierce July, as tempered now and softened by the rich, golden haze of Indian summer, quenching his torrent rays in its mellow, liquid lustre, and robing the distant hills with wreaths of purple light, half mist, half shrouded sunshine; November, with its wheat and buckwheat stubbles, golden or bloody red; with its sere maize leaves rustling in the breeze, whence the quail pipes incessant; with its gay woodlands flaunting in their many-colored garb of glory; with its waters more clearly calm, more brilliantly transparent than those of any other season; November, when the farmer’s toils have rendered their reward, and his reaped harvests glut his teeming garners, so that he too, like the pent denizen of swarming cities, may take his leisure with his gun “in the wide vale, or by the deep wood-side,” and enjoy the rapture of those sylvan sports which he may not participate in sweltering July, in which they are, alas! permitted by ill-considered legislation, in every other state, save thine, honest and honorable Massachusetts.[2] In truth there is no period of the whole year so well adapted, both by the seasonable climate, and the state of the country, shorn of its crops, and not now to be injured by the sportsman’s steady stride, or the gallop of his high-bred setters, both by the abundance of game in the cleared stubbles and the sere woodlands, and by the aptitude of the brisk, bracing weather for the endurance of fatigue, and the enjoyment of manful exercise, as this our favorite November. In this month, the beautiful Ruffed Grouse, that mountain-loving, and man-shunning hermit, steals down from his wild haunts among the giant rhododendrons, and evergreen rock-calmias, to nearer woodskirts, and cedar-brakes margining the red buckwheat stubbles, to be found there by the staunch dogs, and brought to bag by the quick death-shot, “at morn and dewy eve,” without the toil and torture, often most vain and vapid, of scaling miles on miles of mountain-ledges, struggling through thickets of impenetrable verdure among the close-set stems of hemlock, pine, or juniper, only to hear the startled rush of an unseen pinion, and to pause, breathless, panting, and outdone, to curse, while you gather breath for a renewed effort, the bird which haunts such covert, and the covert which gives shelter to such birds.