44 GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF ALABAMA 
sought the top of the tallest tree. The other hens did 
not rear any young. One of them, the following year, 
laid and hatched a dozen eggs. This time a white boy, 
the son of a Baptist preacher, who drove his father’s 
cow to pasture every day in a field near my house, took 
a dozen little turkeys from the mother. The next day he 
brought his gun with him and shot the old hen. I hap- 
pened to be in town when this Nimrod marched down the 
street with my turkey swinging on his back. I was 
standing across the street, and I heard some one say: 
“Vou got her, eh?”’I walked across the street and, full of 
ire, I took my beautiful turkey from the rascal. He did 
not say a word; he was guilty and made no attempt to 
defend himself. I found my little turkeys at his rever- 
end sire’s but the poor little birds had been starved twen- 
ty-four hours, and they all died in spite of my effort to 
raise them. 
“T shall mention one habit of these turkeys, and then I 
shall close this perhaps already too long communication. 
Whenever they were threatened by danger, even when a 
mile from the house, they rose with their loud cry of 
alarm “put! put! put!’ which they never ceased to utter 
’till they found themselves safely alighted in the yard. 
They roosted in a large post oak that had stood for fifty 
years in the yard, and which may have been a hundred 
years old. It was ivy-mantled from the ground; the ivy 
had covered the stem and most of the branches. There at 
least these persecuted birds were safe, and there their 
instinct taught them to fly from danger. 
“Seeing that I could not keep my turkeys, I gave to a 
neighbor one of the cocks, a magnificent bird, so gentle 
that he allowed himself to be taken while feeding from 
my hand. The rest of the flock I killed myself. 
“Thus went my turkeys; the oak where they roosted 
is gone; it was blasted by lightning; the hands that 
planted the ivy and the dear old house itself has vanished 
from earth, and death and the flames have done their 
work. 
‘Return! sad thoughts! return! 
I wish to dream and not to weep’.” (1886b). 
