A Scotch fiddler playing at a wedding drank so much whiskey that on the way home he fell by the roadside.  In the morning he was ashamed and angry and determined to punish himself.  Making haste to the house of a friend, a gamekeeper, he called him out, and requested the loan of a gun.  The alarmed gamekeeper, not liking the fiddler’s looks and voice, anxiously inquired what he was going to do with it.  “Surely,” said he, “you’re no gan to shoot yoursel.”  “No-o,” with characteristic candor replied the penitent fiddler, “I dinna think that I’ll juist exactly kill mysel, but I’m gaun to tak a dander doon the burn (brook) wi’ the gun and gie mysel a deevil o’ a fleg (fright).”

One calm summer evening a red-headed woodpecker was drowned in our lake.  The accident happened at the south end, opposite our memorable swimming-hole, a few rods from the place where I came so near being drowned years before.  I had returned to the old home during a summer vacation of the State University, and, having made a beginning in botany, I was, of course, full of enthusiasm and ran eagerly to my beloved pogonia, calopogon, and cypripedium gardens, osmunda ferneries, and the lake lilies and pitcher-plants.  A little before sundown the day-breeze died away, and the lake, reflecting the wooded hills like a mirror, was dimpled and dotted and streaked here and there where fishes and turtles were poking out their heads and muskrats were sculling themselves along with their flat tails making glittering tracks.  After lingering a while, dreamily recalling the old, hard, half-happy days, and watching my favorite red-headed woodpeckers pursuing moths like regular flycatchers, I swam out through the rushes and up the middle of the lake to the north end and back, gliding slowly, looking about me, enjoying the scenery as I would in a saunter along the shore, and studying the habits of the animals as they were explained and recorded on the smooth glassy water.

[Illustration:  CLOCK.  THE STAR HAND RISING AND SETTING WITH THE SUN ALL THE YEAR Invented by the author in his boyhood]

On the way back, when I was within a hundred rods or so of the end of my voyage, I noticed a peculiar plashing disturbance that could not, I thought, be made by a jumping fish or any other inhabitant of the lake; for instead of low regular out-circling ripples such as are made by the popping up of a head, or like those raised by the quick splash of a leaping fish, or diving loon or muskrat, a continuous struggle was kept up for several minutes ere the outspreading, interfering ring-waves began to die away.  Swimming hastily to the spot to try to discover what had happened, I found one of my woodpeckers floating motionless with outspread wings.  All was over.  Had I been a minute or two earlier, I might have saved him.  He had glanced on the water I suppose in pursuit of a moth, was unable to rise from it, and died struggling, as I nearly did at this same spot.  Like me he seemed to have lost his mind in blind confusion and fear.  The water was warm, and had he kept still with his head a little above the surface, he would sooner or later have been wafted ashore.  The best aimed flights of birds and man “gang aft agley,” but this was the first case I had witnessed of a bird losing its life by drowning.