76 THE HIVE OF THE BEE-HUNTER. 
with them it means chippen-birds and shite-pokes ; may 
be such trash live in my diggins, but I arn’t noticed 
them yet: a bird anyway is too trifling. I never did 
shoot at but one, and I’d never forgiven myself for that, 
had it weighed less than forty pounds. I wouldn’t 
draw a rifle on any thing less heavy than that; and 
when I meet with another wild turkey of the same size, 
T will drap him.” 
“A wild turkey weighing forty pounds!” exclaimed 
twenty voices in the cabin at once. 
“Yes, strangers, and wasn’t it a whopper? You 
see, the thing was so fat that it couldn’t fly far; and 
when he fell out of the tree, after I shot him, on striking 
the ground he bust open behind, and the way the pound 
gobs of tallow rolled out of the opening was perfectly 
beautiful.” 
“ Where did all that happen?” asked a cynical-look- 
ing Hoosier. 
‘Happen! happened in Arkansaw: where else 
could it have happened, but in the creation State, the 
finishing-up country—a State where the sie runs down 
to the centre of the ’arth, and government gives you a 
title to every inch of it? Then its airs—just breathe 
them, and they will make you snort like a horse. It’s 
a State without a fault, it is.” 
re Excepting mosquitoes,” cried the Hoosier. 
“ Well, stranger, except them; for it ar a fact that 
they are rather enormous, and cdo push themselves in 
