Part 2 — STORY OF A PARTRIDGE AND HER CHICKS.

One morning in the beginning of July an agricultural labourer, in the employment of an East Lothian farmer, was driving a reaping-machine in a field of long grass preparatory to haymaking. In a part of the field that the machine had not yet shorn, a hen partridge was sitting on a number of eggs which were within a few short hours of being hatched. It may naturally be conceived that the bird would hear with no little concern the sharp clipping noise made by the machine as, in its progress up and down the ridges, it approached nearer and nearer to the nest; but like a true mother, she would rather die than leave her nearly hatched young. As the knife of the machine, in quick shuttle-like motion, laid swath after swath of goodly rye-grass level with the ground, the iron fingers of the cutter struck the bird, killed her, and drove her some distance from the nest. To the moment of her death she kept the eggs warm; and the young life within them that she had cherished soon afterwards found protection.

The driver of the machine, who was a kind-hearted man, stopped his horses and gazed compassionately on the poor bird. Soon, however, his attention was withdrawn from the dead bird by hearing numerous minute, plaintive, peeping sounds—as if made by very tiny, fine-throated, tender chicks. Hastily concluding that a brood of young partridges lay buried and struggling for life in the nearest swath of grass, he turned it carefully over and over, in expectation of seeing a number of chicks; but after a diligent search, he could not discover any birds whatever. Still the peeping noises continued. The workman stood silent and listened attentively, in order that his ear might catch the true direction of the sounds. By the unceasing 'Peep, peep, peep,' he was attracted to a little hollow in the ground. There, almost hid from observation, lay sixteen sounding eggs, for it was from the eggs that the peeping chorus proceeded! The farmer, who was in the field, came to the spot where the driver was standing; and he being also of a humane disposition, placed the eggs carefully in his handkerchief, and carried them home to the farmstead, where they were soon placed under a common sitting hen. In a few hours afterwards the partridge chicks had broken open their shells, and were running about their foster-mother crying 'Peep, peep, peep.'

The writer may be permitted to add, that when partridge chicks are hatched by a common hen, they should be intrusted to a gamekeeper or other person who understands the kind of food the birds need, otherwise it will be almost impossible to rear them.