cess, as well as I
could make out, were trying to take the life of a meadow lark. No doubt
they found existence a dull affair, and felt the need of something to
enliven it. A noble creature is man,--"a little lower than the angels!"
Two years in succession I have been at the seashore during the autumnal
migration of sandpipers and plovers. Two years in succession have I seen
men, old and young, murdering sandpipers and plovers at wholesale for
the mere fun of doing it. Had they been "pot hunters," seeking to earn
bread by shooting for the market, I should have pitied them,
perhaps,--certainly I should have regretted their work; but I should
have thought no ill of them. Their vocation would have been as
honorable, for aught I know, as that of any other butcher. But a man of
twenty, a man of seventy, shooting sanderlings, ring plovers, golden
plovers, and whatever else comes in his way, not for money, nor
primarily for food, but because he enjoys the work! "A little lower than
the angels!" What numbers of innocent and beautiful creatures have I
seen limping painfully along the beach, after the gunners had finished
their day's amusement! Even now I think with pity of one particular
turnstone. Some being made "a little lower than the angels" had fired at
him and carried away one of his legs. I watched him for an hour. Much of
the time he stood motionless. Then he hobbled from one patch of
eel-grass to another, in search of something to eat. My heart ached for
him, and it burns now to think that good men find it a pastime to break
birds' legs and wings and leave them to perish. I have seen an old man,
almost ready for the grave, who could amuse his last days in this way
for weeks together. An exhilarating and edifying spectacle it
was,--this venerable worthy sitting behind his bunch of wooden decoys, a
wounded tern fluttering in agony at his feet. Withal, be it said, he was
a man of gentlemanly bearing, courteous, and a Christian. He did not
shoot on Sunday,--not he. Such sport is to me despicable. Yet it is
affirmed by those who ought to know--by those, that is, who engage in
it--that it tends to promote a spirit of manliness.

But thoughts of this kind belong not in Dyer's Hollow. Rather let me
remember only its stillness and tranquillity, its innocent inhabitants,
its gray hills, its sandy road, and the ocean at the end of the way.
Even at the western extremity, near the railway and the busy harbor, the
valley was the ver