n until they caught sight of us, when they
bounded off through the woods. Next morning we found the poor mother
lying about three hundred yards from the place where she was shot. She
had run this distance and jumped a high fence after one of the
buckshot had passed through her heart.

Excepting Sundays we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves,
the 4th of July and the 1st of January. Sundays were less than half
our own, on account of Bible lessons, Sunday-school lessons and church
services; all the others were labor days, rain or shine, cold or warm.
No wonder, then, that our two holidays were precious and that it was
not easy to decide what to do with them. They were usually spent on
the highest rocky hill in the neighborhood, called the Observatory; in
visiting our boy friends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, wrestle, and
play games; in reading some new favorite book we had managed to borrow
or buy; or in making models of machines I had invented.

One of our July days was spent with two Scotch boys of our own age
hunting redwing blackbirds then busy in the corn-fields. Our party had
only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest and perhaps
because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of
carrying. We marched through the corn without getting sight of a
single redwing, but just as we reached the far side of the field, a
red-headed woodpecker flew up, and the Lawson boys cried: "Shoot him!
Shoot him! he is just as bad as a blackbird. He eats corn!" This
memorable woodpecker alighted in the top of a white oak tree about
fifty feet high. I fired from a position almost immediately beneath
him, and he fell straight down at my feet. When I picked him up and
was admiring his plumage, he moved his legs slightly, and I said,
"Poor bird, he's no deed yet and we'll hae to kill him to put him oot
o' pain,"--sincerely pitying him, after we had taken pleasure in
shooting him. I had seen servant girls wringing chicken necks, so with
desperate humanity I took the limp unfortunate by the head, swung him
around three or four times thinking I was wringing his neck, and then
threw him hard on the ground to quench the last possible spark of life
and make quick death doubly sure. But to our astonishment the moment
he struck the ground he gave a cry of alarm and flew right straight up
like a rejoicing lark into the top of the same tree, and perhaps to
the same branch he had fallen from, and began to adjust his