204 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



motions and gaze upon the beauty of their forms. Moreover, 

 Mr. Corbin had a son, and Austin junior was as much delighted 

 with the pets as his father. 



There was ample room on the Long Island estate for more 

 than the few Deer, and the Corbins decided that more should be 

 had. This led to the examination of sundry books on the subject 

 of Deer culture, if one may use the term, books like Judge Caton's, 

 for instance, while ' Forest and Stream ' and other periodicals 

 were necessarily read regularly. Certainly the love of nature 

 grows with what it feeds upon, if any emotion of the heart does. 

 If Deer could be kept, why not Elk, Moose, Antelope, and Buffalo 

 — especially the Buffalo ? 



Mr. Corbin had lived in Iowa when a young man, and in the 

 days when the herds of Buffalo on the plains of Nebraska, Kansas, 

 and Texas numbered untold thousands. It was a great pity that 

 such noble animals were likely to become extinct, and the Corbins 

 determined to join in the effort to perpetuate the species. They 

 had begun with a few Deer, and they added Elk, Antelope, and 

 Buffalo, and then it became apparent that the Long Island estate 

 was too small for the proper care of these animals, or at least 

 for the care which the owners desired to give them. 



It is to be particularly noticed that the Long Island estate 

 was not suited to the treatment that the Corbins wished the 

 animals to have. From caring for their few pets had grown the 

 desire to rear herds of these animals under such conditions of 

 freedom as would leave them with all their natural characteristics. 

 A pet Deer was beautiful, but it was not the Deer of the wild woods 

 after all. A pure bred Buffalo in a barn-yard was in fact a 

 Buffalo, but he was too much like a Durham bull to be perfectly 

 satisfactory. On the Long Island farm the animals could scarcely 

 become anything more than pets. 



So the thoughts of the elder Corbin went back to the days of 

 his youth and the foothills of the White Mountains. As most of 

 our readers know, there is plenty of land in New Hampshire that 

 is just as wild now as it was when Hudson first looked on the 

 ground where the Statue of Liberty now stands. There was a 

 deal of it in Sullivan County, perhaps not the wildest in the 

 State, but certainly plenty of unbroken forest that covered hills 

 and valleys, and surrounded little lakes, forests of birch and beech, 

 and maple and pine, and spruce and hemlock, and balsam — forests 



