covert, and shooting whenever you caught even so much as
a glimpse of his gray body through distant interstices of tree and
brush, until, late in the afternoon, human endurance, which always
surpasses that of the wild beast, overcame him, and he leaped less
strongly with each new alarm and grew more reckless before twilight,
and came within easy range and fed his enemies on the morrow? Have you
watched for him beside the brackish waters of the lick, where, perched
upon a rude, high scaffold built beside a tree, mosquito-bitten and
uneasy, you waited and suffered, preserving an absolute silence and
immobility until came ghost-like flitting figures from the forest to
the shallow's edge, when the great gun, carrying the superstitious
number of buckshot, just thirteen, roared out, awakening a thousand
echoes of the night, and, clambering down, found a great antlered thing
in its death agony?

Have you wandered through new clearings neglected for a season and
waded ankle-deep in strawberry blooms, and, later, fed there upon such
scarlet fruit, so fragrant and with such a flavor of its own that the
scientific horticulturist owns to-day his weakness? Have you looked
out upon the flats some bright spring morning and found them
transformed into a shallow lake by the creek's first flood, and seen
one great expanse of shining gold as the sun smote the thin ice made in
the night but to disappear long before mid-day and leave a surface all
ripples and shifting lights and shadows, upon which would come an
occasional splash and great out-extending circles, as some huge mating
pickerel leaped in his glee? Have you stood sometime, in sheer delight
of it, and drawn into distended lungs the air clarified by hundreds of
miles of sweep over an inland sea, the nearest shore not a score of
miles away, and filtered through aromatic forests to your senses, an
invisible elixir, exhilarating, without a headache as the price? Have
you seen the tiger-lilies and crimson Indian-tobacco blossoms flashing
in the lowlands? Have you trapped the mink and, visiting his haunts,
noticed there the old blue crane flitting ever ahead of you through
dusky corridors, uncanny, but a friend? Have you--but there are a
thousand things!

If you have not seen or known or felt all these fair things--so jumbled
together in the allusion here, without a natural sequence or thought or
reason or any art--if you have not owned them all and so many others
that may not