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clysm of nature, we lost our heads and desperately tried to pull up. With our With our slight strength and with bridles of small rope without bits, it was like binding the unicorn with his band in the furrow, in the picturesque image of futility of the Book of Job. In the confusion of that last exciting moment I never knew what actually took place. E always insisted that I had let the head of my lance fall to the ground, and the butt had knocked me over the tail of my horse. It may be so, but that hardly explains why we found ourselves sitting face to face on the earth, with our lances crossed under us, and the horses galloping side by side over the crest of the hill.

We never troubled the farmer's horses again. We had momentarily been moved by the brilliancy of an idea into an unusual audacity, and now, in our failure, we thought only of the penalties that might follow discovery. It did not add to our peace of mind that our bridles still decked the horses, and, in our fear of being seen, we dared not attempt to recover them. For days we did not go near the field, and when we went to the farmer's house for milk, as was the custom of all in our neighborhood, we tried to select the moments when the farmer himself was absent.

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It must have been about this time that I became the proud possessor of my first dog. I do not remember his appearance with any degree of exactness, and I have no knowledge of his pedigree or even of his kind. The fact that he had come aboard my father's vessel in a Southern port with so great an air of confidence in his welcome that my father had not had the heart to ap

pear cold to it, and had subsequently brought him home to me, argues nothing as to his quality at all. Probably he was of the sort that all the world recognized as being a dog, but about which the knowing would be politely incurious; but he accepted me so loyally and affectionately as an equal, ignored my faults so tactfully, and was so eagerly my companion, that I should have been less than a boy not to respond in kind. We were inseparable whenever it was possible, and I can still remember the times when, on going to school or church, I was forced at the gate to order him back. He would look at me with the surprised air of one who had expected something better of me, and then would stop short in his tracks, and until my head dropped below the level of the road at the great oak he would stand motionless.

He became a great part of our games; indeed, at times the greater part, for so uncanny was his skill in finding me, wherever I might be, that shortly it led to experiment, and then to a new game. A boy will believe what he wishes to believe, and in time one forgets all one's failures, but this much is certain, that we were firmly convinced that Jack could follow our trail unerringly by the scent. We knew "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and Jack had come aboard my father's vessel in the South, and to us, of course, the logical conclusion was clear: my dog was a runaway bloodhound.

With one of us sent on ahead as an escaped prisoner or slave, we ran many miles through the woods and fields before the game lost its freshness; but in time, with so rare a possession, I was naturally eager for new worlds to conquer. There were still foxes about us in those days, and my mother herself

had often seen deer come down to drink at the pond into which I had been thought to fall, and rabbits and squirrels abounded, of course. As an adjunct of the dog, a gun was needed to make life complete.

It was a difficult thing to obtain, for my mother was timid about guns; but she had to deal with a persistency that was more harrowing than her fear, and she finally yielded, though the gun I was first permitted to bring to the house as my own was indifferent enough. Indeed, I imagine that it was mainly because of its indifference that she yielded, on the extraordinary theory that the poorer the gun, the safer the gunner. It was an old army rifle that had been converted into a muzzle-loading shotgun, and was so long and heavy that any attempt to bring it to my shoulder to meet the flight of a bird was beyond my strength and alertness; and Jack had proved disappointingly ineffective in bringing us within sight of four-footed game. On those early excursions I was usually accompanied by my boon companions of the hour, one or the other of whom obligingly permitted me to rest the barrel of the gun on his shoulder whenever we approached a spot that seemed a likely one for game. Having a vast credulity as to what were likely spots, we usually presented the extraordinary spectacle of three small figures in single file, the foremost with the barrel of a gun laid across his shoulder, the second with the butt of the stock clutched at his breast and his finger on the trigger-guard, while the third carried powder-horn and shotpouch, stalking perpetually through the landscape, like figures on an Assyrian cuneiform. Later, with a crotched stick that we hung half-way down the

barrel, we devised a rest for the gun not unlike those that we had seen portrayed in pictures of ancient harquebuses. If it brought us no greater success than our old method, it at least gave us the satisfaction of masquerading as historical figures, and simply to carry a gun seemed to gild the day with romance and the possibility of happy adventure.

Once, indeed, when later I had acquired a real shotgun, I had met with success of a most unusual fashion. We had gone out that day without a dog, an elder brother of my companion having claimed by the rights of seniority the admirable pointer that we usually shot over, and, the season being near its close, we tramped all the afternoon over fields undisturbed by the whir of wings. The legal period for snaring quail had expired, and with our recent promotion to the ranks of real hunters, we had quickly acquired a natural indignation of illegal practices, and having by chance come upon four snared birds, we had pocketed them, after the manner of our elders. Passing through a patch of woods on our way home near twilight, we had put up a flock, but with no chance to shoot, owing to the screening foliage. The birds had risen near a pile of underbrush, and knowing their propensity to hide whenever a covert was at hand, we pounced upon the scrags, and caught two that had become enmeshed in the network of branches. Naturally, we were uplifted by the extraordinary luck of six quails without firing a shot.

For the two that were alive I made a comfortable pen of a large box, and all winter I fed them with wheat and patiently tried to tame them. But wildness was in their nature, and seemed

only to increase with the approach of spring; and when at last the forests had begun to show yellow and red, I pushed aside the slats of the box and caught the frantic creatures one by one. I held up my arms and spread my hands open. With just the pause of a second, as though for the moment they could not believe they were free, their wiry claws clutched at my palms, and then with a whirring roar of their wings they shot straight east past the line of cherry-trees on to the woods. I had lost my possible pets, but two plump birds had been spared the sparse table spread in the snow-fields. I hope that, with all their terror of me, they at least boasted of my wheat among their lean companions.

We never had the fine duck-shooting of the Great South and Peconic bays, but even in the hardest winters, when ice made the use of boats impossible and the few small feeding-grounds were covered, we sometimes hoped against hope and walked the sound beach by the hour on the small chance of a shot at the few ducks that fed alongshore. One bitterly cold day two or three of us were skulking behind the ice-cakes piled high on the beach, following the course of some ducks that appeared to be nearing the land, when we heard a faint shout, and, looking up the steep face of Mount Misery, saw a boy that we knew wave his hand. A moment later we saw him drop over the edge of the cliff and prepare to descend.

One who has sailed up and down the sound knows the high, white cliffs of that part of the island, and Mount Misery is one of the highest. The cliffs are of sand, and in summer are soft and yielding, but in winter they are sometimes like granite, and we

shouted to the boy to go around to Money Hollow and come down through the gorge. But either he did not hear us or thought little of our caution, for he came steadily on, while we, with the aggrieved complacency of those whose warnings of disaster have been scorned, gazed upward in the eager expectation of what we thought likely to prove a thrilling spectacle.

We were not disappointed. He slipped a little at his first step, and fell to his knees on the next, and on his third was in full flight, wheeling and turning with extraordinary rapidity, his arms and legs flaying the air, raying out from his body in eccentric circles. He had dropped his gun at the start, but it loyally refused to leave him, and amicably, side by side, they wheeled and bumped down the frozen declivity. I know that I was fascinated by that gun, but whether with the horror of potential catastrophe or with a morbid curiosity to see it suddenly spit fire, I am not sure. I know the thought was present in my mind that a boy who would attempt to come down the face of Mount Misery on a day like that would be just the one to walk through the thick woods on the summit with his gun at full cock.

Boy and gun reached the foot neck and neck, and came to a full stop on the shore. As he rose to his feet, the boy was a spectacle. His clothes were frayed by the frozen grit, and his face. and hands scratched and bleeding; but he had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that in his dizziness and bewilderment he had not yet felt the full pain. For a moment he stared at us vacantly; then he spoke.

"Well, I got down," he said with the challenging air of one who half expected us to deny it.

About that time I had become, with another small boy, the owner of an old-fashioned rifle. Under the spell of "The Leather Stocking Tales," we had called it "Kildeer," in the fond belief that it was like that of the Deerslayer. But prowling one day about a local workshop, we had come across a longbarreled pistol of an antique type and had asked the owner about it. He was the stuttering man who at the time of our great revival had not risen for prayers because of his fear of swearing at an inopportune moment, and presently he succeeded in telling us that it was a dueling-pistol. I was excited at once, because I had recently come into the possession of a life of Andrew Jackson, and his marksmanship made me emulous. We began bargaining, offering our rifle in exchange, and finally succeeded in obtaining from the owner the promise to look at the rifle "some day."

But "some day" to us, in our boyish eagerness, meant at once, and ten minutes later we thrust the rifle into his hands, and presently went out to the meadow in the rear of the shop to shoot at a mark. With a knowledge of human nature and the psychology of trading that neither of us knew we possessed, we purposely shot wild, but loudly marveled at the skill of the other. He turned to us solemnly and said: "B-b-b-boys, I c-c-c-can't h-h-hhelp it; r-r-r-runs in th-th-the f-f-ffam❜ly. M-m-my w-w-w-wife's f-f-f-ffather, you k-k-k-know, is th-th-the b-b-b-best sh-sh-sh-shot r-r-r-round here."

In the end we carried the pistol home in triumph. A great attraction was the mold for making its own bullets which went with the pistol, and I have a recollection of absorbing times spent

in molding bullets and melting the lead in a frying-pan over the kitchen stove

and incidentally of appearing at school with a bandaged face from peering too closely at the sputtering lead in a moment of surprising eruption.

We never became Andrew Jacksons and we never fought a duel, and after, by happy chance, I had splintered the end of a new knife that I had used as a bull's-eye stuck through the center of a piece of white paper, we turned our attention to shotguns again. The knife thereafter was of little use as a knife, but I carried it for years, my pride in it as a proof of my luck-it could always be camouflaged as skill— being greater than the need of a more useful knife.

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Of course we had the usual games of the period, which we played at school and on holidays, like prisoners'-base, huck-chuck, and snap-the-whip, which we oftener played on ice. There was also the game that we called "mummydaddy," in which for some unknown reason we always carried whip-like wands as we chased one another over the hills in a sort of hare and hounds. Our chief athletic sports were the running and broad jumps and the hop, skip, and jump, though oftener we made it a hop, three skips, and a jump, and some of us put up horizontal bars in our back yards for such gymnastic feats as we could compass. Trap-ball was just passing as I came to the age for it, but one-old-cat was always popular-so popular with me, indeed, that once through it I fell into temptation, and suffered so swift a retribution that I might have passed as the personal embodiment of a tale right out of a Sunday-school book of the period.

One Saturday morning my mother had sent me to the drug-store in haste for a bottle of sirup of squills for a younger brother, and no one could have censured my lack of speed until I was half-way home again. There, at the foot of Thompson Street, the boys were playing ball. Now, I have always felt that when one has saved a penny, he has a right to spend half of it in celebration of his thrift; and here it seemed wholly commendable to pause a moment to catch my breath and join in the game while I waited. I had thrust the bottle into a trousers' pocket for the greater freedom of my hands; unfortunately, however, the transfer did not stabilize my legs, for almost immediately I fell, breaking the bottle in my impact with the hard earth. Now, nothing in the world is stickier than sirup of squills, and it was a wholly dolorous youth who hurried back to the drug-store for a fresh bottle, and thence by a back street home.

I cannot recall clearly, but I think it more than probable that my confession of having stopped to play ball brought in its wake one of the rare corporal punishments that I received from my mother. They were always amicable affairs in a way, in which the parent suffered more than the child. I took good care of that. She would tell me gravely that she would have to whip me, and would send me out to cut a switch. I always cut it from an apple-tree, and solely for the reason that apple-tree switches are characteristically short, and, being short, are necessarily lacking in thickness. What thickness they had I sometimes neutralized by making a cut in the twig half-way up its length, on the logical assumption that the normal mother who broke a whip on her child would

more speedily arrive at a state of penitence. After all, the punishments were wholly satisfactory; for they restored our cordial relations, they never hurt, and one needed to feel no remorse after having paid the physical penalty of wrong-doing.

Base-ball was not popular, though mainly for the reason that there was scarcely a piece of ground in the whole neighborhood level enough for a proper field. We did organize two clubs, the Young Americas and the Excelsiors, which played for a season. I well remember the great trepidation of mind with which once after Sunday school I found the captain of the Young Americas and his advisers waiting for me outside and how solemnly they debated my availability. We wore for uniform a broad collar of red flannel, with two narrow edgings of white tape, and with cuffs to match. The cuffs and collars of the Excelsiors were similar, but of blue flannel instead of red.

A great test of prowess was "climbing the hickory," a tall and slender walnut-tree that stood at the edge of the school-house woods. It rose slender and straight without a branch for forty or fifty feet, and was worn almost to the smoothness of glass by the countless arms and legs that had desperately encircled it. To reach the small clump of limbs at the top was in a way our toga virilis, and failure to reach it at last would always have been a cloud on the memory of our youth. In my sensitiveness to the thought of continued failure in public, I went to the tree to practise alone after dark many times before I reached a state of assurance, and when at last in public I lifted my hand to grasp the first bough at the top of the tree and quickly drew myself up to a sitting position, I

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