168 COMMON SENSE 
Enemies. 
AE lost but few chickens by disease, but the battle 
against winged and four-footed enemies was constant. 
Large hawks took off some of our best hens—hens that 
we thought were perfectly safe, on account of their size and 
strength. Cats would come miles to steal our little chickens, and 
weasels and skunks killed a few. But the greatest enemy was the 
common rat, and he was, also, the most difficult to circumvent, if 
we except certain bipeds who were evidently possessed of all the 
cunning and none of the honesty, that ought to distinguish hu- 
manity. 
The hawks were not very troublesome, that is to say, they 
did not kill many. We shot them without nrercy, whenever we 
had a chance, but I must confess they did not always give us a 
good chance. As for traps on poles and all such contrivances, we 
found them - perfectly: useless, so far as these marauders were con- 
cerned, though we sometimes caught birds that we would rather 
have seen escape. I, therefore, had them all taken down and de- 
pended upon constant vigilance and a good breech-loader. I 
chose a breech-loader, because it could stand with the cartridges 
ready prepared and tied in a bag to the trigger guard, and thus be 
almost as ready as a loaded muzzle-loader, and the latter, when 
standing in a barn, is altogether too dangerous. I kept a muzzle- 
loader at first, but, on one occasion, a carpenter, who was at work 
on the place, picked it up, discharged it through pure meddlesome- 
ness and nearly killed a fellow workman. After that, I adopted 
the breech-loader. I generally used very heavy shot, so that 
we might be able to do execution at long ranges, and I studied 
carefully the rules for “loading so as to kill” laid down in a 
little work called “Shooting on the Wing,” and found them ad- 
mirable, so that the hawks and crows began to consider our 
