The eastern end of Long Island, that extremity which seems to stretch out like the hand of welcome towards the nations of the old world, beckoning their inhabitants to our hospitable shores, is divided into two long points like the tines of a fork. The upper point shuts in Long Island Sound, and protects our inland commerce from the violence of the “Great Deep;” while the lower prong, which is kissed on the one side by the blue waters of the Peconic Bay, and on the other is buffeted by the billows of the great Atlantic, is known as Montauk Point. The heaving ocean seems here to have solidified itself into a sandy soil, which rises and swells and rolls, much after the manner of its mighty prototype, except that a scanty garment of tawny grass clothes the outlines of the billowy waste. “Cattle on a thousand hills” here roam in a state of, at least, semi-independence, which they occasionally assert by charging upon the intruding sportsman in a manner which may be intended as playful, but which looks somewhat serious. For a dozen miles or so only four houses break the monotony of the dreary expanse, and it is to one of these, distant some nine miles from the extreme point, that I am about to carry the reader, for here alone can plover-shooting be enjoyed in its fullest perfection. There are numerous kinds of plover that make their migratory passages along our coasts; but the one to which I refer, while to the epicure it ranks almost, if not absolutely, the first upon the list, and affords, by the swiftness of its flight and the eccentricity of its habits, a prize not unworthy of the highest efforts of the sportsman, has been the victim of many a misnomer, but is correctly known by the appellation American Golden Plover, _Charadrius pluvialis_ (P.). The Plover-family is large and of high respectability; but, when “upon his native heath,” no one of its clans is entitled to wear a loftier crest than that which we now have under discussion. His near relative, the Bartramian Sandpiper or Grey Plover, is perhaps more aristocratically delicate in his figure, and is welcomed as heartily at the table of the epicure. But he is less social in his habits, and rarely affords any but single shots. He does not fraternize with wooden counterfeits, and his mellow whistle, as he rises at an impracticable distance, rarely responds to even the most seductive efforts of his pursuer. But our Golden friend, notwithstanding his auriferous title, his superior beauty of plumage, his swiftness and strength, and the savory reputation which he enjoys among the knowing-ones, is possessed of gregarious habits, of a singularly frank and unsuspicious nature, and is generally ready to stop and have a chat with anything which bears the faintest resemblance to a bird and a brother. It is well for his admirers that such is his nature; and although the wide appreciation of his merits certainly causes great destruction among his ranks, still the vast flocks which, sometimes for