rap which is laid to
receive them.

This snare is placed across a hole about the size of a crown piece, and
consists of a strong noose made of horsehair, which is fixed to a peg,
and so arranged that the slightest touch causes it to rebound and catch
them by the leg.

In the hole is laid a fine, fat, red worm, healthy and tempting, and, in
order to prevent the poor prisoner's escaping, the sportsman has devised
a method of keeping him down in spite of himself, by pinning him to the
ground at one end with a long thorn--it is presumed worms do not feel;
his miserable contortions attract the attention of the hungry woodcock,
who immediately seizes this irresistible tit-bit.

Every preparation completed and the snare baited, the hole, the worm,
and the noose are carefully covered over by a withered leaf--a second
snare, similarly concealed, is set on the right, a third in the middle,
and so on at a distance of three or four feet from each other. All is
now in readiness, and twilight finds the sportsman covered up in his
skins at some fifty paces from his traps. Here, after having comforted
his inward man, and sharpened his sight by swallowing two or three
glasses of cognac, addressing between them an invocation to his patron
saint, he listens and waits.

On come the long-bills, looking right and left, pecking the ground,
peering at the moon and the stars, and eating all they can find in their
way. They now approach the dangerous defile, and some of the younger
ones fly over the traps; others, more prudent, turn back; but the main
body hold a council of war, when the staff officers having decided that
these Thermopylae must be passed, first one woodcock and then another
taking heart proceeds, and the sportsman hugs himself in his success on
perceiving the whole troop making towards the baits he has spread for
them. Before long one of the birds gets its leg entangled, totters,
falls, rises again, but in doing so is made fast by the noose, and in
spite of its efforts is unable to advance a step further. Another,
hearing the sound of a worm struggling at the bottom of a hole, darts
in its beak, with the charitable intention of ending the prisoner's
sufferings, and on raising its head is suddenly seized by the neck. The
sportsman now steals softly from his hiding-place, and, stooping down,
smashes the woodcock's brain with his thumb nail, and so on with the
next, after which he retreats to his post, and keeps up the game til