y-stick. At first he thought his eye was
put out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cut
above it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at a
pump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. It
suddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now,
and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; by
help of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himself
presentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and went
joyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure it
had not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurried
home to share the joyful news with his family.

He went hunting the very next Saturday, and at the first shot he killed
a bird. It was a suicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal
upon it so close that it could not escape even the vagaries of that
wandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boy
could bring only a few feathers of it away. In the evening, when his
father came home, he showed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted
of his exploit with the minutest detail. His father asked him whether he
had expected to eat this sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it
together. He said no, sap-suckers were not good to eat. "Then you took
its poor little life merely for the pleasure of killing it," said the
father. "Was it a great pleasure to see it die?" The boy hung his head
in shame and silence; it seemed to him that he would never go hunting
again. Of course he did go hunting often afterward, but his brother and
he kept faithfully to the rule of never killing anything that they did
not want to eat. To be sure, they gave themselves a wide range; they
were willing to eat almost anything that they could shoot, even
blackbirds, which were so abundant and so easy to shoot. But there were
some things which they would have thought it not only wanton but wicked
to kill, like turtle-doves, which they somehow believed were sacred, nor
robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry, and they kept
about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed a shame to
shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were the turtle-doves,
which used to light on the Basin bank, and pick up the grain scattered
there from the boats and wagons.

There were a good many things you could do with a gun: you could fire
your ramrod