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the incident made its ineffaceable marks on me, the meaning of which I am not yet able to understand. Out of the conditions of such strife it is possible that there have come values in the chastening of my spirit, and in the sobering of my thought toward a better companionship with the great God. That afternoon I knew there was a God, and I believed in him to the degree that I was angry with him because he kept me from killing old Jim. God had actually driven me away from my purpose, but I harbored the feeling and intent of murder. regretted the loss of the opportunity, and vowed I would never lose another. It was an intense, a burning, an all-consuming passion in me, all that afternoon, from which I found no relief till father came riding in at the gate shortly after sunset.

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I had such a sleepless night that the family became anxious about me. The feeling of murder is an awful thing. Keep it out! Keep it out! It takes so much to call the spirit from under its deadening blast, so much to enthrone again the sweeter fellowships of life. It is well to know life, but it is also just as well not to have certain kinds of experiences.

"My father fed his flocks, a frugal swain,
Whose constant care was to increase his store,
And keep his only son, myself, at home."

WE

-JOHN HOME.

E are all civilized now. We have the pride of culture. We want it understood we are up with the times. But I shall make the contention that the remains of a savage life are in us. The hunt and the chase, by heredity, has its fascinations. We revel in the tales of huntsmen. Love for the chase and for hunting is a relic of the wild life of our barbarous forefathers. Civilized as we are, we have our fine hunting-dogs and our breech-loaders. We are

more splendidly equipped than the old hunters were. What we lack in game, we make up in powder and shot. We have to invent many ex

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pedients to make hunting justifiable at all now. One modern hunter puts it in this way: "The exercise is worth the time, and the noise is worth the ammunition; and if there be any game, it is clear profit." The less the game, the greater the equipment for the business. There is plenty of hunting, but nothing to hunt; more guns than ever, more fishing tackle; and no game in the woods, no fish in the streams. These are degenerate days. There are three or four hunters to every partridge in the hedge. There are a half-dozen boys (not counting the darkies) to every rabbit in the grass. I saw two colored men, the other day, send four loads of shot after one poor little rabbit. O for the good old days before shot-guns were invented—when marksmen were not so unworthy as to resort to unfair means to capture the innocents of the forest! To draw a bead for the placing of a single bullet-that is fair. Let a rabbit jump up and run off thirty or sixty yards, stop to see if you are coming, push his ears up over the grass to listen; then if you can bead him off-hand and get him, he is rightly your meat; if not, you could see him another day-no more that day. Wild game, sir, had a fair chance in the olden time. No violation of conscience in taking it. You measured your powder from the ox-horn

into the rooster-spur charger, you poured it into your gun; then you took your tallowed patching from your left pants pocket; then you took a bullet from your deerskin shot-pouch; then you opened your old frogsticker, cut the patching from around the bullet; then you pulled your ramrod through the brass thimbles and pushed the bullet down, gave it three raps to bounce the ramrod out; then you primed the tube with more powder, and picked it in with a brass pin; then you put on the percussion-cap, and by that time, if the game was not a mile away, it ought to be shot dead on the spot.

I am of the opinion that people in an early day talked more than they do now; that is, in what was to them a profitable way. The themes were not of science or philosophy or art or the latest cablegram from across the sea, but of things within the sweep of their intellectual horizon. The family life now is silenced greatly by newspapers and books. Each blessed member gets off in a corner, and holds fellowship with strangers. The art of talking may yet be lost, or it may be taught as one of the classics.

The great log-fire in our cabin home invited to enjoyment. The day's work over, the supper finished, hickory wood-fire blazing brightly, and