as if covered by the edge of a dense cloud.  This proved to be an eclipse.  Nevertheless, he fired at the mother, and she immediately ran off, jumped the fence, and took to the woods by the way she came.  The fawn danced about bewildered, wondering what had become of its mother, but finally fled to the woods.  David fired at the poor deserted thing as it ran past him but happily missed it.  Hearing the shots, I joined David to learn his luck.  He said he thought he must have wounded the mother, and when we were strolling about in the woods in search of her we saw three or four deer on their way to the wheat-field, led by a fine buck.  They were walking rapidly, but cautiously halted at intervals of a few rods to listen and look ahead and scent the air.  They failed to notice us, though by this time the moon was out of the eclipse shadow and we were standing only about fifty yards from them.  I was carrying the gun.  David had fired both barrels but when he was reloading one of them he happened to put the wad intended to cover the shot into the empty barrel, and so when we were climbing over the fence the buckshot had rolled out, and when I fired at the big buck I knew by the report that there was nothing but powder in the charge.  The startled deer danced about in confusion for a few seconds, uncertain which way to run until they caught sight of us, when they bounded off through the woods.  Next morning we found the poor mother lying about three hundred yards from the place where she was shot.  She had run this distance and jumped a high fence after one of the buckshot had passed through her heart.

Excepting Sundays we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves, the 4th of July and the 1st of January.  Sundays were less than half our own, on account of Bible lessons, Sunday-school lessons and church services; all the others were labor days, rain or shine, cold or warm.  No wonder, then, that our two holidays were precious and that it was not easy to decide what to do with them.  They were usually spent on the highest rocky hill in the neighborhood, called the Observatory; in visiting our boy friends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, wrestle, and play games; in reading some new favorite book we had managed to borrow or buy; or in making models of machines I had invented.

One of our July days was spent with two Scotch boys of our own age hunting redwing blackbirds then busy in the corn-fields.  Our party had only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest and perhaps because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of carrying.  We marched through the corn without getting sight of a single redwing, but just as we reached the far side of the field, a red-headed woodpecker flew up, and the Lawson boys cried:  “Shoot him!  Shoot him! he is just as bad as a blackbird.  He eats corn!” This memorable woodpecker alighted in the top of a white oak tree about fifty feet high.  I fired from a position almost immediately beneath