ever hit anything with it. He could not
shut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aim
with both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till one
day when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blow
over his left eye from a shinny-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 afterwards, 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, because they were the symbols of the
Holy Ghost; it was quite their own notion to hold them sacred. They
would not kil