THE FIRESIDE AT " FAR AWAY." 73 



" Oh, that is too bad, Doctor ! " cried Jackson, as the negroes 

 shouted with fun. 



" No, no," said the Doctor, laughing away, " that is not all of 

 the story. My friend here was there, too, peeping through the 

 palisades over his rifle, when I shut the gate. It was his proposi- 

 tion that I should go in for the Commodore, and as I came back, 

 I heard a cap snap, his gun had missed fire while endeavouring to 

 kill one of the deer, while I was gone." 



The mirth that followed this apocryphal story was like nothing 

 but the laughter that hails some unusual feat of the Polichinelle, 

 before the gaping circle of children and nurses in the gardens of 

 Paris, and it gradually subsided, lingering longest farthest from 

 the door, where the negro boys could roll over on their backs 

 without restraint, and laugh themselves quiet, and then to return 

 for a fresh draught of fun. 



" To come back to your deer's head," I said to Miss Jackson, 

 after the laugh had subsided, " where did you procure the glass 

 eyes ? " 



" Oh, father supplies them with his broken bottles ; the shoulder 

 of the bottle makes an eye, only a little too flat." 



" And the birds on the wall are dressed by you ? " 



" Yes, all of them." 



"And they are truer to natur' 'an a picter," added Mike 

 approvingly. 



 Where did you get your . taste for such matters, Miss 

 Jackson ? " 



" I think I must have got it from associating with them, to the 

 exclusion of other society. We lead a lonely life here in the pine 

 woods, sometimes, and I believe that when one has many gifts he 

 does not gain from them all as much as he does from one well 

 studied." 



" Where did you get your original plan, your first lesson in 

 taxidermy ? " said the Doctor ; " for I have studied the art, and it 

 seems to me that I have never dressed a bird as well as some you 

 have here." 



" I never had any lesson, save what I have read. Once, when 

 first attempting it, I sent to Savannah and bought a stuffed bird 



