My Boyhood and Youth 



charge. The startled deer danced about in 

 confusion for a few seconds, uncertain which 

 way to run until they caught sight of us, when 

 they bounded off through the woods. Next 

 morning we found the poor mother lying about 

 three hundred yards from the place where she 

 was shot. She had run this distance and jumped 

 a high fence after one of the buckshot had 

 passed through her heart. 



Excepting Sundays we boys had only two 

 days of the year to ourselves, the 4th of July 

 and the ist of January. Sundays were less than 

 half our own, on account of Bible lessons, 

 Sunday-school lessons and church services; all 

 the others were labor days, rain or shine, cold 

 or warm. No wonder, then, that our two holi- 

 days were precious and that it was not easy to 

 decide what to do with them. They were usu- 

 ally spent on the highest rocky hill in the neigh- 

 borhood, called the Observatory; in visiting 

 our boy friends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, 

 wrestle, and play games ; in reading some new 

 favorite book we had managed to borrow or 

 I 174! 



