SATURDAY, APRIL 7. The quail, or tufted partridge, abounds in California, and is a delicious bird. A walk of ten minutes in any direction from Monterey, will bring you into their favorite haunts. But they are extremely shy; it is no easy matter to strike them on the wing: they are out of one bush and into another before you can level your piece, unless, like the Irishman hitting his weasel, you fire first and take aim afterwards. I must attribute my success frequently to hits of this kind; for a deliberate aim was sure to come too late,—just like an old bachelor’s proposal of marriage, which, as his vanity whispers him, might have been accepted had it been made a _little_ sooner, but now the dulcinia has changed her mind, and the fat is all in the fire. What a pity that such a pelican should be left alone in this world’s wilderness, and the community be deprived of all the little pelicans that might have been! But I was speaking of quail, and not of pelicans, and of the difficulty of hitting them. Gen. Mason is the best shot here; a quail, to fly his fire, must be as quick on the wing as a message, in its sightless career, over one of Morse’s magnetic wires. To me one of the most enticing features in California life is presented in her game. It comes in every variety of form, from the elk and buck that rove her forests and prairies, to the rabbit that undermines the garden-hedge; and from the wild goose and duck, which sweep in clouds her ruffled waters, to the little beca that feeds on her figs. A good sportsman might live the year round, amid these meadows and mounds, on the trophies of his fowling-piece and rifle, and as independent of civilized life as any savage that ever bent the bow or steadied his bark canoe over the rushing verge of the cascade.