BOYHOOD AND BIRDS. 
55 
mate gratification to that whicli they have afforded me in 
the act of recalling them, I may perhaps be pardoned for 
making as nearly as is possible " a free breast of it !" 
I must therefore be permitted to confess, after my own 
fashion, one of the first, of the many droll troubles, in which 
the Hunter-Naturalist in the earlier stages of his experiences 
and development is liable to be involved. 
While yet a boy, I had one, out of a number of sisters, 
who, being nearest my own age, became naturally my espe- 
cial playmate. She had dark lustrous eyes, delicate features, 
and a form lithe, supple and elastic as that of a she wild-cat ; 
and like that creature also, possessed a marvellous facility of 
ascension — that is, she had a faculty of ascending, by that 
indefinite process called climbing," the uttermost boughs 
of plumb trees, apple trees, cherry trees, pears trees, &c., 
&c., — as also the tops of fences, barns, houses and such 
like! 
She was, hence and therefore, quite generally christened 
Tom-boy" — ^but, if ever any vulgar sense of that phase was 
misapplied, it was in this instance, as characterizing a severe 
audacity — that, as it was above fear or thought of evil, never 
dreamed in its pride of the possibility of misconstruction. 
She was fearless, because God had gifted her thus in her in- 
nocence that she dreaded not his Justice ! 
She was my dainty compeer and companion in many an 
enthusiastic forage into the wild domains of Nature. 
I shall proceed to relate one of the most memorable of 
these in which she assisted me, as only her sex could have 
done, in relation to some young " Mocking birds in a 
STRANGE NEST ": 
It must be premised that, at the settlement of Kentucky, 
the mocking bird ( Tardus polyglottus) was not known in the 
land as a resident ; but that, when the war-whoop had ceased 
to affright the silence, and the ring of the deadly rifle given 
way to the peaceful clang of scythes, whetted by mowers in 
the broad, green, smiling meadows, then the king of song- 
