lit on fence rails and dead trees,
so that they were pretty easy to shoot. If you could bring home a
yellowhammer you felt that you had something to show for your long day's
tramp through the woods and fields, and for the five cents' worth of
powder and five cents' worth of shot that you had fired off at other
game. Sometimes you just fired it off at mullein-stalks, or barns, or
anything you came to. There were a good many things you could do with a
gun; you could fire your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through the
air; you could fill the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, and
send the water in a straight column at a fence. The boys all believed
that you could fire that column of water right through a man, and they
always wanted to try whether it would go through a cow, but they were
afraid the owner of the cow would find it out. There was a good deal of
pleasure in cleaning your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuck
in it and you could hardly get it out. You poured hot water into the
muzzle and blew it through the nipple, till it began to show clear; then
you wiped it dry with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiled
it with greasy tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw,
and stay in the barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder in
at the nipple to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the old
muzzle-loading shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays.

But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired and
footsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as you
came in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit for
supper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy's mother
ever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind of
preserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly take
the time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before you
rushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you left
it with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and saved
you the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good deal
quicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly.

Next to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late, was the pleasure
of starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shoot
ducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had an
alarm-clock, which he set at about four,