t year--don't you remember, boys? He'd
follow us for miles through the bush, raise game, point a partridge all
right, and the second we shot a gun off--no more dog. All you'd see was
a white-and-tan streak with its tail curled under it, making for home."

"Well," said Tommy McLean, a boy who never spoke until all the rest had
thrashed a subject out, "I'd rather see a fellow gun-shy than see him
a bally idiot with fire-arms. I know when I got my gun, I got a lesson
with it. Father gave it to me himself, when I was fourteen, last year.
I never saw him look so serious as when he put it in my hands and said,
'Tom,' (he always calls me Tom, not Tommy, when he's in earnest)--'Tom,'
he said, 'a gun is a good thing in the right hands, a bad thing in the
wrong. A boy that is careless with a gun is worse than a born idiot; a
boy that in play points a gun, loaded or unloaded, at any person, place,
or thing, should be, and often does, land in prison. A gun is made for
three things only: the first, to shoot animals and birds for food alone,
not for sport; the second, to defend one's life from the attack of wild
beasts; the third, to shoot the tar out of the enemy when you are
fighting as a soldier for your sovereign and your flag.'"

"Bully for Tommy's father!" yelled Bert. "I hate being lectured, but
that sounds like good common sporting sense, and we'll all try to stick
by it on this hunting trip."

They were a nice lot of boys, all jolly, sturdy, manly chaps, who,
however, seldom included Billy Jackson in their outings, for every
holiday seemed to find him too busy to join them. For notwithstanding
his unfortunate fear of a gunshot, Billy had always been a great lover
of a uniform. As a youngster he would follow the soldiers every parade
day, not for the glory of marching in step to the music of the band, but
for the chance it gave him to throw back his shoulders, puff out his
small chest, and blow on his tin pipe-whistle in adoring imitation of
the bugler. He thought there was nothing in the world so important as
the bugler. Billy thought it did not matter that the shining little
"trumpet" merely voiced an officer's commands. The fact always remained
that at the clear, steady notes the soldiers wheeled to do his bidding;
that the bugler was a power for courage or cowardice, whichever way a
boy was built.

Then, as he grew older, he, too, began to practise on a bugle. He would
sit out on the little side verandah, early and lat