The bracelet was disengaged—the berthé released. The French lady made a low courtesy to the countess, with her eyes bent upon the ground—and they parted.
Fortune is a capricious goddess, and surely the wildest, most improbable romances ever imagined, could not surpass, scarcely equal, the strange reverses the blind goddess of the wheel has brought to the family of the great “World-Actor of the Nineteenth Century,” Napoleon.
QUAIL AND QUAIL SHOOTING.
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BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, AUTHOR OF FRANK FORESTER’S “FIELD SPORTS,” “FISH AND FISHING,” ETC.
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THE AMERICAN QUAIL, OR VIRGINIA PARTRIDGE.
(Ortyx Virginianus. Perdix Virginianus.)
November is upon us—hearty, brown, healthful November, harbinger of his best joys to the ardent sportsman, and best beloved to him of all the months of the great annual cycle; November, with its clear, bracing, western breezes; its sun, less burning, but how far more beautiful than that of fierce July, as tempered now and softened by the rich, golden haze of Indian summer, quenching his torrent rays in its mellow, liquid lustre, and robing the distant hills with wreaths of purple light, half mist, half shrouded sunshine; November, with its wheat and buckwheat stubbles, golden or bloody red; with its sere maize leaves rustling in the breeze, whence the quail pipes incessant; with its gay woodlands flaunting in their many-colored garb of glory; with its waters more clearly calm, more brilliantly transparent than those of any other season; November, when the farmer’s toils have rendered their reward, and his reaped harvests glut his teeming garners, so that he too, like the pent denizen of swarming cities, may take his leisure with his gun “in the wide vale, or by the deep wood-side,” and enjoy the rapture of those sylvan sports which he may not participate in sweltering July, in which they are, alas! permitted by ill-considered legislation, in every other state, save thine, honest and honorable Massachusetts.[[2]]