small party of a dozen or so of passenger pigeons, birds I had not seen for a quarter of a century and never expected to see again. I saw them two or three times flying hither and thither with great rapidity, and once they perched in a tall dead pine on the edge of an old field. They were unmistakable; yet the sight was so unexpected that I almost doubted my eyes, and I welcomed a bit of corroborative evidence coming from Dick, the colored foreman at Plain Dealing. Dick is a frequent companion of mine in rambles around the country, and he is an unusually close and accurate observer of birds, and of wild things generally. Dick had mentioned to me having seen some “wild carrier pigeons,” as he called them; and, thinking over this remark of his, after I had returned to Washington, I began to wonder whether he too might not have seen passenger pigeons. Accordingly I wrote to Mr. Wilmer, asking him to question Dick and find out what the “carrier pigeons” looked like. His answering letter runs in part as follows: “On May 12th last Dick saw a flock of about thirty wild pigeons, followed at a short distance by about half as many, flying in a circle very rapidly, between the Plain Dealing house and the woods, where they disappeared. They had pointed tails and resembled somewhat large doves—the breast and sides rather a brownish red. He had seen them before, but many years ago. I think it is unquestionably the passenger pigeon—_Ectopistes migratorius_—described on p. 25 of the 5th volume of Audubon. I remember the pigeon roosts as he describes them, on a smaller scale, but large flocks have not been seen in this part of Virginia for many years.” I fear, by the way, that the true prairie chicken, one of the most characteristic American game birds, will soon follow the passenger pigeon. My two elder sons have now and then made trips for prairie chickens and ducks to the Dakotas. Last summer, 1907, the second boy returned from such a trip—which he had ended by a successful deer hunt in Wisconsin—with the melancholy information that the diminution in the ranks of the prairie fowl in the Dakotas was very evident.