I believe that one of the very best things about our way of following a partridge is the sense of intimacy with the countryside which it creates--an intimacy which nothing else has ever given us. In most outdoor faring one sticks to the roads and paths, in fishing one keeps to the water-courses, in cross-country tramping one unconsciously goes around obstacles. Nothing but the headlong and undeviating pursuit of a bird along a path of his choosing would ever have given me that acquaintance with ledge and swamp and laurel copse that I now possess. I know our swamp as a hippopotamus might, or--to stick to plain Yankee creatures--a mud turtle. It is a very swampy swamp, with spring holes and channels and great shallow pools where the leaves from the tall swamp maples--scarlet and rose and ashes of roses--sift slowly down and float until they sink into the leaf mould beneath. I have favorite paths through it as the squirrels have in the tree-tops; I know where the mud is too deep to venture, where the sprawling, moss-covered roots of the maples offer grateful support; I know the brushy edges where the blossoming witch-hazel fills the air with its quaint fragrance; I know the sunny, open places where the tufted ferns, shoulder high, and tawny gold after the early frosts, give insecure but welcome footing; I know--too well indeed--the thickets of black alder that close in about me and tug at my gun and drive me to fury. Yes, we know that swamp, and other swamps only less well. We know the rock ledges, the big dry woods of oak and chestnut and maple and beech. We know the ravines where the great hemlocks keep the air always dim and still, and one goes silent-footed over the needle floor. We grow familiar, too, with all the little things about the country. We discover new haunts of the fringed gentian, the wonderful, the capricious, with its unbelievable blue that one sees nowhere else save under the black lashes of some Irish eyes. We find the shy spring orchids, gone to seed now, but we remember and seek them out again next May. We surprise the spring flowers in their rare fall blossoming--violets white and blue in the warm, moist bottom-lands, sand violets on the dry knolls, daisies, hepaticas, buttercups, and anemones-- I have seen all these in a single day in raw November. We learn where the biggest chestnuts grow--great silky brown fellows almost twice the size of Jonathan's thumb. We discover old landmarks in the deep woods, surveyors' posts, a heap of stones carefully piled on a big rock. We find old clearings, overgrown now, but our feet still feel underneath the weeds the furrows left by the plow. Now and then we come upon a spot where once there must have been a home. There is no house, no timbers even, but the stone cellar is not wholly obliterated, and the gnarled lilac-bush and the apple tree stubbornly cling to a worn-out life amidst the forest of young white oaks and chestnuts that has closed in about them. Once we came upon a