were of them.

The ruff is to the partridge what the train is to the peacock--his chief
beauty and his pride. A hen's ruff is black with a slight green gloss.
A cock's is much larger and blacker and is glossed with more vivid
bottle-green. Once in a while a partridge is born of unusual size
and vigor, whose ruff is not only larger, but by a peculiar kind of
intensification is of a deep coppery red, iridescent with violet, green,
and gold. Such a bird is sure to--be a wonder to all who know him, and
the little one who had squatted on the chip, and had always done what
he was told, developed before the Acorn Moon had changed, into all
the glory of a gold and copper ruff--for this was Redruff, the famous
partridge of the Don Valley.

IV

One day late in the Acorn Moon, that is, about mid-October, as the
grouse family were basking with full crops near a great pine log on the
sunlit edge of the beaver-meadow, they heard the far-away bang of a
gun, and Redruff, acting on some impulse from within, leaped on the log,
strutted up and down a couple of times, then, yielding to the elation of
the bright, clear, bracing air, he whirred his wings in loud defiance.
Then, giving fuller vent to this expression of vigor, just as a colt
frisks to show how well he feels, he whirred yet more loudly, until,
unwittingly, he found himself drumming, and tickled with the discovery
of his new power, thumped the air again and again till he filled the
near woods with the loud tattoo of the fully grown cock-partridge. His
brother and sister heard and looked on with admiration and surprise, so
did his mother, but from that time she began to be a little afraid of
him.

In early November comes the moon of a weird foe. By a strange law of
nature, not wholly without parallel among mankind, all partridges go
crazy in the November moon of their first year. They become possessed of
a mad hankering to get away somewhere,' it does not matter much where.
And the wisest of them do all sorts of foolish things at this period.
They go drifting, perhaps, at speed over the country by night and are
cut in two by wires, or dash into lighthouses, or locomotive headlights.
Daylight finds them in all sorts of absurd places, in buildings, in open
marshes, perched on telephone wires in a great city, or even on board
of coasting vessels. The craze seems to be a relic of a bygone habit
of migration, and it has at least one good effect, it breaks up the
families and pre