Unless the winter be unusually mild, they may be seen associating in the pasture with the cattle, and even following them home to glean the grain that falls into the barnyard, and pick up the scraps that are thrown to the chickens. This delightful confidence is not always abused, for many persons take pains to foster the bevies they find spending the winter in some brushy hillside near the house by daily scattering grain or clover-seed upon the snow where the hungry birds may come and get it. The pert air with which one of the cocks will perch himself on a fence-rider or walk sedately along a stone wall in the early sunlight of a glistening January morning is reward enough to the benefactor, if he cares not to preserve them for the selfish pleasure of shooting them the following autumn. As a delicate article of food the Quail is highly esteemed, and during the time the law allows the markets are filled with bunches of them. Various devices in the form of snares, nets and traps are called into service to effect their capture, and in some parts of the country, New England especially, fresh importations have been necessary to preserve a sufficient number for sport. Bands of beaters in the Southern and Western States cautiously drive immense flocks into nets, but there is less danger of exterminating this than almost any other species of game-bird, it would seem, on account of its sequestered habits and prolificacy. Taming and domestication is an easy matter with these birds. In all cases, however, where the eggs have been hatched under a hen at liberty, the Quail chicks have run away to the woods as soon as the leaves have turned sear in the fall and never come back. They sang their “Ah, Bob White!” just as clearly before they had ever heard one of their kin as any woodland-bred Quails could do. It is quite common to re-colonize portions of the Eastern States when they have become depopulated, and an effort made some years ago to introduce these birds into the Salt Lake Valley of Utah was eminently successful. Within the past few years some of the West India Islands have been colonized, but attempts to acclimatize the birds in England and Ireland have proved most signal failures. RUFFED GROUSE. Considerable misapprehension exists in relation to the popular appellation of this species. In some parts of the country it is dubbed the Partridge, while in others it goes by the name of Pheasant. It is neither. All its affinities point away from these families, in the direction of the True Grouse, of which it constitutes a useful and interesting member. Pheasants are never found in the United States, but are indigenous to Southern Asia. Their nearest representative here is the Wild Turkey. Almost as much may be said of the Partridge, a group of birds which are exclusive denizens of the Old World.