226 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



sands of cattle daily for the food of the human race; 

 and sheep and oxen, after all, as Thoreau said, "are 

 but larger squirrels." The majority of wild animals 

 that are killed by man die more or less instantaneously ; 

 and it is true at least of some of them that they would 

 otherwise have a lingering, painful death from star- 

 vation, or sickness, or old age, alone, deserted, or mal- 

 treated by even their own families. 



I can not refrain from closing this paper with two 

 selections on hunting from Thoreau and Dr. W. C. 

 Gray. Thoreau thought that his having witnessed the 

 killing of a moose up in Maine, the destruction of one 

 of "God's own horses," had lowered him, and expresses 

 his regret in these beautiful and inspiring words: 



"I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the 

 coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was re- 

 minded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily 

 as one would pluck a flower. . . . Nature looked sternly 

 upon me on account of the murder of the moose." 



Dr. Gray likewise, though in his time more of a 

 hunter, had at last his final hunt, when, stricken by 

 remorse, he gave up the practice. He had just shot 

 a deer, but had not hit it fatally, and tells the conclud- 

 ing story thus (and may it be ours also) : 



"He was helplessly wounded, not killed. As I advanced 

 upon him, he fixed his large, lustrous, frightened eyes upon 

 me, and I ended his life with another shot. There he lay in 

 all his purity and beauty. I was smitten to the heart with 

 remorse. I considered that he had lived the pure and innocent 



