wide plains, or tangled
woods, or on the wild hill tops--this, surely, to the reflective
sportsman--and who can be a true sportsman, and not reflective--is the
great charm of his pursuit."

"And do you not think that this pleasure exists in a higher degree here
in America than in our own England?"

"As how, Frank?--I don't take."

"Why, in the greater, I will not say beauty--for I don't think there is
greater natural beauty in the general landscape of the States--but
novelty and wildness of the scenery! Even the richest and most
cultivated tracts of America, that I have seen, except the Western part
of New York, which is unquestionably the ugliest, and dullest, and most
unpoetical region on earth, have a young untamed freshness about them,
which you do not find in England.

"In the middle of the high-tilled and fertile cornfield you come upon
some sudden hollow, tangled with brake and bush, which hedge in some
small pool where float the brilliant cups and smooth leaves of the water
lily, and whence, on your approach, up springs the blue-winged teal or
gorgeous wood-duck. Then the long sweeping woodlands, embracing in
themselves every variety of ground, deep marshy swamp, and fertile level
thick-set with giant timber, and sandy barrens with their scrubby
undergrowth, and difficult rocky steeps; and, above all, the seeming and
comparative solitude--the dinner carried along with you and eaten under
the shady tree, beside the bubbling basin of some spring--all this is
vastly more exciting, than walking through trim stubbles and rich turnip
fields, and lunching on bread and cheese and home-brewed, in a snug
farmhouse. In short, field sports here have a richer range, are much
more various, wilder--"

"Hold there, Frank; hold hard there; I cannot concede the wilder, not
the really wilder--seemingly they are wilder; for, as you say, the
scenery is wilder--and all the game, with the exception of the English
snipe, being wood-haunters, you are led into rougher districts. But oh!
no, no!--the field sports are not really wilder--in the Atlantic States
at least--nor half so wild as those of England!"

"I should like to hear you prove that, Archer," answered Frank, "for I
am constantly beset with the superiority of American field sports to
tame English preserve shooting!"

"Pooh! pooh! that is only by people who know nothing about either; by
people who fancy that a preserve means a park full of tame birds,
instead of a range