snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he
is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random
into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so is it
with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he
will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts,
and the color of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can
_anticipate_ it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots
double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields. The
sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches unweariedly, and loads and
primes for his particular game. He prays for it, and offers sacrifices,
and so he gets it. After due and long preparation, schooling his eye and
hand, dreaming awake and asleep, with gun and paddle and boat he goes
out after meadow-hens, which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed
of, and paddles for miles against a headwind, and wades in water up to
his knees, being out all day without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets
them. He had them half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to
shove them down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game
from his windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and
perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world
never see it _with the feathers on_. The geese fly exactly under his
zenith, and honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied
by firing up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one
of his traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his game-spirit
increases, heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he
dies, he will go to more extensive, and, perchance, happier
hunting-grounds. The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork
in his dreams, till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a
girl who, being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by
the quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was
accustomed to pick them up country where she came from. The astronomer