ll along the Savannah, with wild turkeys around me, I have never
seen a live one.

I was in a small steamboat on the Savannah River one night. We were tied
up till morning along the river bank under the trees of the deep swamp.
Twilight and the swamp silence had settled about us. The moon came up. A
banjo had been twanging, but the breakdown was done, the shuffling feet
quiet. The little cottonboat had become a part of the moonlit silence
and the river swamp.

Two or three roustabouts were lounging upon some rosin-barrels near by,
under the spell of the round autumnal moon. There was frost in the air,
and fragrant odors, but not a sound, not a cry or call of beast or bird,
until, suddenly, breaking through the silence with a jarring eery echo,
was heard the hoot of the great horned owl.

One of the roustabouts dropped quickly to the deck and held up his hand
for silence. We all listened. And again came the uncanny
_Whoo-hoo-hoo-whoo-you-oh-oh!_

"Dat ol' King Owl," whispered the darky. "Him's lookin' fer turkey. Ol'
gobbler done gone hid, I reckon. Listen! Ol' King Owl gwine make ol'
gobbler talk back."

We listened, but there was no frightened "gobble" from the tree-tops.
There were wild turkeys all around me in the swamp; but, though I sat up
until the big southern moon rode high overhead, I heard no answer, no
challenge to the echoing hoot of the great owl. The next day a colored
boy brought aboard the boat a wild turkey which he had shot in the
swamp; but I am still waiting to see and hear the great bronze bird
alive in its native haunts.

390

Vernon L. Kellogg (1867--) is a professor in
Leland Stanford Junior University whose
writings have been chiefly scientific. His
_Insect Stories_, from which the next selection
is taken, is an interesting and instructive
group of stories suitable for pupils in the
third, fourth, or fifth grade. A later book is
called _Nuova, the New Bee_. ("The Vendetta" is
used by permission of the publishers, Henry
Holt & Co., New York City.)

THE VENDETTA

VERNON L. KELLOGG

This is the story of a fight. In the first story of this book, I said
that Mary and I had seen a remarkable fight one evening at sundown on
the slopes of the bare brown foothills west of the campus. It was not a
battle of armies--we have seen that, too, in the little world we
watch,--but a combat of gladiators, a strugg