One day the boy found a strange bird under the door-step, a beautiful brown creature, as large as a pigeon, with a long, straight bill, and eyes at the top of its head. He took it to his father, a dogmatic man, who gave him a queer mixture of truth and nonsense as his portion of natural history. It was a blind snipe, he said; and there was some truth in that. It couldn't see because its eyes were out of place; it was a very scarce bird that appeared occasionally in the fall, and that burrowed in the mud for the winter instead of migrating,--and all this was chiefly nonsense.
When the boy took me to see his queer find I called it a woodcock and began to tell about it eagerly, but was stopped short and called a liar for my pains. A wordy war followed, in which Natty Dingle's authority was invoked in vain; and the boy, being bigger than I and in his own yard, drove me away at last for daring to tell him about a bird that his own cat had caught and that his own father had called a blind snipe. He pegged one extra stone after me for saying that there were plenty of them about, only they fed by night like owls, and another stone for shouting back that they did not burrow in the mud like turtles in dry weather, as his oracle had declared. And this untempered zeal is very much like what one generally encounters when he runs up against the prejudices of naturalists anywhere. Hear all they say,--that the earth is flat, that swallows spend the winter in the mud, that animals are governed wholly by instinct,--but don't quote any facts you may have seen until the world is ready for them. For it is better to call a thing a blind snipe, and know better, than to raise a family row and be hit on the head with a stone for calling it a woodcock.
The little woodcocks, though scarcely bigger than bumblebees, run about hardily, like young partridges, the moment they chip the shell, and begin at once to learn from the mother where to look for food. In the early twilight, when they are less wild and the mother is not so quick to flutter away and draw you after her, I have sometimes surprised a brood of them,--wee, downy, invisible things, each with a comically long bill and a stripe down his back that seems to divide the little fellow and hide one half of him even after you have discovered the other. The mother is with them, and leads them swiftly among the bogs and ferns and alder stems, where they go about turning over the dead leaves and twigs and shreds of wet bark with their bills for the grubs that hide beneath, like a family of rag-pickers each with a little stick to turn things over. Mother and chicks have a contented little twitter at such times that I have never heard under any other circumstances, which is probably intended to encourage each other and keep all the family within hearing as they run about in the twilight.