There comes a time toward the spring of the year after the quail season is over when the average rural darky is "between hay and grass." The merchants on whom he has depended for supplies make it a practice to refuse credit between January first and crop time. The black has spent his cotton money, his sweet potato pile has vanished, the sorghum barrel is empty, he has eaten the last of his winter's pork, and all that remains is a bit of meal and the meat his gun can secure. He is hunting in grim earnest now, using all the cunning and skill acquired by years of practice. He eats woodpeckers, jaybirds, hawks and skunks, drawing the line only at crows and buzzards. At this season of the year I have carried chicken hawks up to the cabins for the sake of watching the delight of the piccaninnies who with glowing eyes would declare, "Them's mos' as good as chicken." What happens to the robins, doves, larks, red birds, mocking birds and all songsters in this hungry season needs hardly to be stated. It is also a time between hay and grass for the rabbits and the quail. The corn fields are bare and the weed seeds are exhausted. A spring cold spell pinches, they lose their vitality, become thin and quite lack their ordinary wariness. Then the figure-four trap springs up in the hedgerow and the sedge while the work of decimation goes more rapidly along. The rabbits can no longer escape the half-starved dogs, the thinning cover fails to hide the quail and the song birds betray themselves by singing of the coming spring. With the growing scarcity of the game now comes the season of sedge and field burning. This is done ostensibly to prepare the land for spring plowing, but really to destroy the last refuge of the quail and rabbits so that they can be bagged with certainty. All the negroes of a neighborhood collect for one of these burnings, all their dogs, and of course all the boys from six years old up. They surround the field and set it on fire in many places, leaving small openings for the game to dash out among the motley assembly. I have seen quail fly out of the burning grass with flaming particles still attached to them. They alight on the burnt ground too bewildered to fly again and the boys and dogs pick them up. Crazed rabbits try the gauntlet amidst the barking curs, shouting negroes and popping guns, but death is sure and quick. The few quail that may escape have no refuge from the hawks and nothing to eat, so every battue of this kind marks the absolute end of the birds in one vicinity; and the next day the darkies repeat the performance elsewhere.