174 



AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



we shall not die unavenged.") I have looked upon 

 these quaint old Latin inscriptions with mingled feel- 

 ings of kindliness and pathos. Written in the early 

 '40's, they were still legible in 1897, though the letters 

 were somewhat grown over with new bark, and thus 

 made distorted and spread apart and quite indistinct, 

 and it was with some difficulty that I could make them 

 out. But both trees were finally cut down, and sawed 

 into lumber or split up for firewood, and the singular 

 old schoolmaster and his strange ways are now only 

 a memory, coming dimly through the trees out of the 

 far-away past. 



Traps? The old woods was full of them. All 

 sorts of snares were cunningly devised with which to 

 beguile the unsuspecting forest creatures. And the 

 necessity to make the rounds of the traps daily was fre- 

 quently the occasion of a somewhat prolonged absence 

 from the fields in corn-cutting or potato-digging time. 

 No, we never caught anything in these twitch-ups, that 

 I recall. But they were very excellent traps, and were 

 constructed, somewhat after the manner of Izaak Wal- 

 ton's flies for fishing, of horsehair, cord, pieces of wire, 

 and twine. We frequently found them sprung, and 

 once there were actually a few hairs from a gray squir- 

 rel's tail left caught in a noose. The horsehairs we 

 pulled and twitched from the tails of our humble beasts 

 of burden, and their long silky tassels grew noticeably 

 shaggy and ragged after part had been impressed into 

 our service. As many as twenty-one quail at once 

 were caught years ago, so the saying goes, in a big 

 figure four trap, made by a Nimrod of the day, who 

 has now grown into a gray-haired hunter and lover of 

 the woods. 



