"It's all right, my boy. Tell your sister she'll have a nice time at Nassau, and if she doesn't come back in the spring as good as new, then Captain Joe'll never prophesy again as long as he lives.
"She'll not find any Spanish dollars, maybe, but there's things worth more—and one is good health."
[THE STORY OF A WILD GOOSE.]
Two years ago, one evening, while I was returning home from an unsuccessful shooting excursion along the Atlantic shore, I observed a flock of wild geese coming toward me, but sailing high. I stood perfectly still, and when the flock was directly overhead I aimed and fired.
In the twilight I could see the flock scattering at the report, and a bird wheeling downward with one wing limp and useless. He landed on a patch of plowed ground with a thud and lay half stunned. In a moment I had secured my prize.
It was a large gander in prime condition, with a full, deep body, and healthy, lustrous feathers, and I determined to spare his life.
I quickly tied his legs and fastened the uninjured wing. Then, carefully lifting the bird and getting the broken limb into as comfortable a position as possible, I carried him home. Most sportsmen have a crude knowledge of surgery, and I soon had the broken member bandaged with splints and strips of cotton and my captive resting comfortably, unbound, in a warm outhouse.
In the morning, when I went out to feed him, he was walking around lively enough, and, although, of course, very shy and timid, he ate a hearty breakfast of corn as soon as he thought himself unobserved. In a few days he grew tame enough to allow me to stroke him with a bit of stick. It was long before he would suffer himself to be touched by the human hand.
After some months the bird would answer to his name, Michael, would eat out of my hand, and when I let him out into the yard, after clipping his wings, would follow me around like a dog. He invariably fled at the approach of a stranger, but he never "hissed" like a domestic goose. Strange to say, although a flock of domestic geese was kept by a neighbor, he never paid the slightest attention to their cries and calls.