ster saloons
there; no cigar shops for them to loitre round; no gangs of bad, idle
boys to teach them all sorts of mischief;--plenty going on in the
country to amuse them innocently--terrible rattlesnakes to be
slaughtered; woodchucks to be hunted; hawks to be shot (who make
mince-meat of the poor little chickens); maple sugar and cider to make;
husking frolics to go to. Just as if I didn't know what was best for
boys, if I _am a woman_. I tell you, some of the greatest heroes in the
world have had _women for mothers_.

THE BOY WHO LIKED NATURAL HISTORY.

Hal Hunt lived at the "Seven Corners;" he was just six years old last
Fourth of July; and as "independent" as you might suppose, with _such_
a birth-day to boast of.

He was on the gun-powder order, I can tell you; bound to make a _fizz_
wherever he went, always popping up in odd places, and frightening
nervous old ladies, and little two-year-olders, who had ventured away
from their mothers' apron strings. Every cat and dog, for ten miles
round, made for the nearest port when Hal and his torn straw hat loomed
up in the distance.

Hal never was in a school room in his life; but it didn't follow that
he did no studying for all that. On the contrary, he sat there, on the
steps of his father's grocery store, with his chin between his little
brown palms, doing up more thinking than the schoolma'am would have
allowed, except in recess.

Hal was very fond of Natural History;--in fact, he had about made up
his mind, that as soon as he owned a long-tailed coat, he would own a
menagerie. Pigs, geese, hens, ducks, cows, oxen, nothing came amiss to
him that went into Noah's ark. He expected to have a grand time when he
got that menagerie--setting them all the cars, and hearing them growl
behind their bars.

One day he sat on the door-step running it over in his mind, when the
old rooster, followed by his hens, marched in a procession past the
door.

There was the speckled hen, _black and white_, (with red eyes) looking
like a widow in half mourning; there was the white one that _would_
have been pretty, hadn't she such a turn for fighting that her feathers
were as scarce as brains in a dandy's head; there was the _black_ one,
that contested her claims with the white hen, to a kernel of corn, and
a place in the procession next the rooster, in a manner that would have
delighted the abolitionists.

Hal watched them all, and then it struck him, all of a sudden, that