314 ACCESSIBLE FIELD SPORTS. 



when my experience was far from being as great as 

 it is now. 



As deer in the Eastern States of America are nearly 

 exterminated, my friends will have, at least in imagi- 

 nation, to believe themselves transported to the grand 

 and luxuriant West, to no less a locality than the 

 Wabash Valley, in Southern Illinois, where the soil is 

 rich and fat, the timber heavy, and corn sometimes 

 reaches fifteen feet in height ; where the atmosphere is 

 redolent of miasma and fever ; where the inhabitants 

 shake half the time with chills, and their complexions 

 resemble yellow ochre, with a little of its brilliancy 

 extracted ; where, half the year, floods cut you off from 

 the rest of the world, and you are compelled to become 

 a boatman or a Robinson Crusoe, whether you like it 

 or not. However, good fellows, with big, kind hearts, 

 are to be found here ; and if anything in this world can 

 compensate, which I doubt, for loss of health, I am 

 inclined to believe that it is the bon camerade of a 

 genial spirit. But times are changed since the date 

 I name ; the skilful, good, kind, little doctor of the 

 district a host in himself has departed for the land 

 of gold ; the hunter, my companion- a Dutchman by 

 name but not by nature retired, possibly, to his 

 favourite Yazoo bottom, in Arkansas, to re-awaken its 

 extensive woods with the echo of his deadly rifle, and 



