The mating impulse

By Edwin Balmer
Author of “The Peace Advocate, ” “Under the Orion,” Etc.
A comedy of “The Cause”—which almost became a tragedy. How an American girl became the most militant of militant suffragists and narrowly escaped a chance for a hunger strike in an English prison.
It was the day in autumn which, in Scotland and England, opens the season for red grouse, the great game bird of the northern counties and the highlands of heather; and at five o’clock in the glorious, clear afternoon, the Northeastern’s extra train from London, hurrying special parties of sportsmen to their Scotch shooting boxes, had gained the wooded hills of Durham and Northumberland.
Peace and tranquillity—almost somnolency—lay over the land. Gentle slopes of brown grain ripened in the sun; in meadows, red and white cattle grazed; a few farmers envied the passing sportsmen from gardens of late lettuce and greens. Beyond and all about were heavy woodlands, deep green with the sun on oak leaves, burnished with the copper of beeches and with the ground all dark with the shade of ancient, guarded trees. A lane through them showed an English gentleman’s home unchanged in four hundred years; the towers of a Norman cathedral asked no more favors of the woods than it had eight centuries earlier, when Northumberland knight and esquire looked to the stone summits from the road upon which the train now ran. The sparkle of water sometimes shone as the land lowered to the right. There was the North Sea; and if it brought to the sportsmen disturbing thoughts of Germany beyond, it showed them also a British dreadnaught steaming off the coast on watch.
The newspapers brought reports of grouse in unusual numbers; coveys clouded the moors. As the train ran more silently, the eager yelp of the bird dogs in the forward vans came to the men in the reserved compartments. Servants entered to lift tea baskets down from the racks heavy with guns; they lit spirit lamps and arranged sandwiches. The English, upon the extra train for Scotland, sighed with deep content.