l 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. One of the apprentices
in the printing-office kept a shot-gun loaded beside the press while he
was rolling, and whenever he caught the soft twitter that the doves make
with their wings, he rushed out with his gun and knocked over two or
three of them. He was a good shot, and could nearly always get them in
range. When he brought them back, it seemed to my boy that he had
committed the unpardonable sin, and that something awful would surely
happen to him. But he just kept on rolling the forms of type and
exchanging insults with the pressman; and at the first faint twitter of
doves' wings he would be off again.

My boy and his brother made a fine distinction between turtle-doves and
wild pigeons; they would have killed wild pigeons if they had got a
chance, though you could not tell them from turtle-doves except by their
size and the sound they made with their wings. But there were not many
pigeons in the woods around the Boy's Town, and they were very shy.
There were snipe along the river, and flocks of kildees on the Commons,
but the bird that was mostly killed by these boys was the yellowhammer.
They distinguished, again, in its case; and decided that it was not a
woodpecker, and might be killed; sometimes they thought that woodpeckers
were so nearly yellowhammers that they might be killed, but they had
never heard of any one's eating a woodpecker, and so they could not
quite bring themselves to it. There were said to be squirrels in the
hickory woods near the Poor-House, but that was a great way off for my
boy; besides the squirrels, there was a cross bull in those woods, and
sometimes Solomon Whistler passed through them on his way to or from the
Poor-House; so my boy never hunted squirrels. Sometimes he went with his
brother for rabbits, which you could track through the corn-fields in a
light snow, and sometimes, if they did not turn out to be cats, you
could get a shot at them. Now and then there were quail in the
wheat-stubble, and there were meadow-larks in the pastures, but they
were very wild.

After all, yellowhammers were the chief reliance in the chase; they were
pre-occupied, unsuspecting birds, and