The geese come wedging their way northward; the ducks awaken the silent marshes with the whistle of their pinions; the snipe come in pairs and wisps to the thawing bogs--all on their way to breeding grounds and summer homes. The tears of April are for them. Wherever they stop for a day's or an hour's rest, and a little food to strengthen and hearten them for their long journey, the deadly, frightful gun awaits to kill, maim, or terrify, more merciless than all the ills that nature inflicts in her unkindest moods. Year after year men go on making laws and crying for more, to protect these fowl in summer, but in spring, when as much as ever they need protection, the hand of man is ruthlessly against them. When you made that splendid shot last night in the latest gloaming that would show you the sight of your gun, and cut down that ancient goose, tougher than the leather of your gun-case, and almost as edible, of how many well-grown young geese of next November did you cheat yourself, or some one else of the brotherhood? When from the puddle, where they were bathing their tired wings, sipping the nectar of muddy water, and nibbling the budding leaves of water weeds, you started that pair of ducks yesterday, and were so proud of tumbling them down right and left, you killed many more than you saw then; many that you might have seen next fall. When the sun was shining down so warm upon the steaming earth that the robins and bluebirds sang May songs, those were very good shots you made, killing ten snipe straight and clean, and--they were very bad shots. For in November the ten might have been four times ten fat and lusty, lazy fellows, boring the oozy margins of these same pools where the frogs are croaking and the toads are singing to-day. "Well, it's a long time to wait from November till the earth ripens and browns to autumn again. Life is short and shooting days are few at most. Let us shoot our goose while we may, though she would lay a golden egg by and by." Farmers do not kill their breeding ewes in March, nor butcher cows that are to calve in a month; it does not pay. Why should sportsmen be less provident of the stock they prize so dearly; stock that has so few care-takers, so many enemies? Certainly, it does not pay in the long run. X THE GARTER-SNAKE When the returned crows have become such familiar objects in the forlorn unclad landscape of early spring that they have worn out their first welcome, and the earliest songbirds have come to stay in spite of inhospitable weather that seems for days to set the calendar back a month, the woods invite you more than the fields. There nature is least under man's restraint and gives the first signs of her reawakening. In windless nooks the sun shines warmest between the meshes of the slowly drifting net of shadows.