THE NATURALIST DEVELOPING. 59 
to win it as a reward, and then grasping the bright new 
weapon, in truculent rage, slew, with my first shot, the 
audacious intruder, as it fluttered in triumph above the house 
it had usurped. 
What a strange sensation it was as I lifted that first 
gasping victim of my prowess, and saw the blood upon my 
hands. 
I believe that blood, warm, dropping blood, maddens our 
race, and makes fiends of us,—for any devil of them all might 
have envied my ferocious exultation! It was my first taste 
of blood, shed by my own act, and the red, infernal nectar 
fired through my veins the raging ecstacies of a new lust that 
all incarnadined the blue, holy sky, and dimmed, angrily, the 
green, cheerful earth! From that moment the fiercer impulse 
of the hunter was aroused, to grow apace towards its stern 
joys! 
The tyrant king bird knew me for a foe, and would ruffle 
his vermilion crest at the very sight of me, and dip at my 
head with waspish, querulous twitterings, for now there was 
mortal feud between us; and when I saw the quarrelsome 
braggart persecute, with cruel buffetings, such blithe embody- 
ments of musical mirth as the little Parson Oriole, and wag- 
ging Wren, my heart would be moved to deadly indignation on 
behalf of my gentle playmates; but when the warrior-bird 
‘screamed its game defiance as it fell before my aim, and 
pecked and clawed at me to the last gasp, then my respect 
was aroused, and I stood over it, sorrowing for my hasty 
wrath. 
-But such compunctious visitings would become less and 
less frequent with each new deed of bloody retribution !—as 
I fain would call it now. In my puisance I assumed to be 
the champion of weakness and the oppressed, out in this free 
world of nature; and going forth slaying, and to slay, its 
tyrants, I loved to call by self-approving names this lust fer 
slaughter that grew upon me. 
