The ruffled grouse may be called the king of our Northern game birds. Delighting in mountains and thick swamps, wild, and strong of wing, the hunter who brings one down when under full headway must be of steady nerve, quick sight, and skillful with long practice.
If a modern artist were to draw a sketch to illustrate an article on our hunting season, it would have to differ very much from the pretty picture on the preceding page. The spear and cross-bow are weapons unknown to modern American hunters, and instead of the winding of the horn, there is only the shrill note of the dog whistle. And we may say, Alas the change! The spear was not always thrown aright; it and the arrow hit but one object at a time, and had a limit to their flight. But nowadays, with our highly trained dogs, and our ever-loaded breech-loading guns, able to mow down a whole flock at once, what chance has bird or animal, however well provided by nature with means of safety?
Little is the wonder that our game grows scarcer year by year. With no vast landed estates, as in England, to be kept stocked and preserved, it will not be very long before woodcock, quail, and grouse will be curiosities even to the farmers' boys, who will have to invent some new pleasure to take the place of the hunting sports of which their grandfathers will tell them.
I wonder how many young people who sit down to practice or take a lesson at the piano-forte know the story of the instrument now familiar in every household of the civilized world. Look at it as we have it to-day, almost perfect in size and quality and tone. It is capable of producing the fullest and the softest sounds, just as its name indicates, for _piano_ means soft, and _forte_ means loud. Can you realize that little more than a hundred years ago pianos were a rarity? Only one or two makers produced any instruments worthy of the name, and few households possessed one. "But," I can hear my young readers exclaim, "the music we play on our pianos--Bach and Haydn, as well as old English airs--were certainly played on some horizontal instrument." Of course they were, but not on our kind of piano-fortes; and the story I am going to tell will take you back far into the sixteenth century, when ladies of rank, and monks and nuns, and some troubadours, had the instruments from which our piano is descended. These were known as the clavichord and the virginal.