the Southern District of New York.
A REMARKABLE
HUNTING-EXCURSION.
On a September morning of the year 1817, Solomon Sweatland, of Conneaut, on the Ohio shore of Lake Erie, had risen at earliest dawn to enjoy his favorite amusement of hunting deer. Royal game was this, and hunted in royal parks, which the dukes and princes of haughty old England might envy, and, best of all, they were not barred from the poorest settler. There was no punishment for "poaching" on the magnificent prairies, and in the glorious forests of the West. The men who there slung their rifles over their shoulders, and set out, careless whether they met a fawn or a panther, would have sneered at an English hunting-ground as a bit of a handkerchief which one of their favorite "per-raries" could tuck away in her pocket and never feel it. Men who can "drive the nail" and "snuff a candle," three shots out of six, and who kill such dainty game as squirrels by blowing the breath out of them with the wind of their bullets instead of lacerating their little bodies with the ball; who have hand-to-hand, or hand-to-paw, tussles with ferocious grizzlies, and make nothing of two or three deer before breakfast, may afford to smile at their fox-hunting, partridge-shooting English cousins. Such were the men who first settled our now populous Western States; and we may well believe that the healthy and thrilling excitement of pursuits like these compensated for the want of many luxuries, and that they became so attached to their free and venturesome modes of life, as to feel stifled at the idea of the constraints of society.
"Their gaunt hounds yelled, their rifles flashed—
The grim bear hushed his savage growl;
In blood and foam the panther gnashed
His fangs, with dying howl;
The fleet deer ceased its flying bound,
Its snarling wolf-foe bit the ground,
And, with a moaning cry,