Many as three or four - would be seen to rise at various
points and distances, and one had to mark and keep in memory the exact
spots to visit them successively and find the nests. The English
method of going out and quartering the ground in search of a nest in
likely places where the birds breed was too slow for us.
The nests I found that morning contained one or two and sometimes
three eggs - very rarely the full clutch of four. Before midday I had
got back with a bag of sixty-four eggs; and that was the largest
number I ever gathered at one time.
Our dinner consisted of meat and pumpkin, boiled or baked, maize "in
the milk" in its season and sweet potatoes, besides the other common
vegetables and salads. Maize-meal puddings and pumpkin pies and tarts
were common with us, but the sweet we loved best was a peach-pie, made
like an apple-pie with a crust, and these came in about the middle of
February and lasted until April or even May, when our late variety,
which we called "winter peach," ripened.
My mother was a clever and thrifty housekeeper, and I think she made
more of the peach than any other resident in the country who possessed
an orchard.
