Page:The Passenger Pigeon - Mershon.djvu/163

132 and hung them up to dry in the same manner as dried beef (I mean the breasts). Of course the remainder of the carcasses we cooked for immediate use, or as much of them as we needed for the family. Let me tell you that those pigeon breasts were a dainty morsel, and would last as long as dried beef and was far its superior in taste.

While rummaging through the attic a few days since, I came across the old pigeon stool upon which the stool-pigeon was tied, which my father used so many years ago, and it carried me back to my boyhood and conveyed to my mind vivid memories of the past.

The pigeons continued to visit us in great abundance for a number of years, although there would be an occasional season when there would not be so many. As the years rolled by they became fewer in number until in the fall of 1876, when I saw my last Passenger Pigeons (a small flock of ten or fifteen), I tried hard to procure some for my cabinet, but failed.

One peculiar habit of the Passenger Pigeons was that during their migrations, should they alight and their crops were filled with inferior food, they would vomit it up in order to fill themselves with something better should they find it.

F. N. Lawrence stated in Forest and Stream of February 18, 1899, that when a boy, in the late forties, he spent most of his time on his grandfather's country seat at Manhattanville, on the North River. In those