The requisite was handed—the exquisite appeased. But his quiet was brief. Calling to him the same locomotive assistance, he inquired:
'Now, individual, I want some sacrificed-threshed-indigent-williams. Have you got any?'
'Not one, upon my soul, your honor; that is, if you mean turnips.'
'Turnips!—curse turnips!—you double-distilled Vandal—you Goth—you Visigoth! I mean, have you any roasted whippoorwills?'
'Holy Paul!' said a Hibernian 'help,' who had drawn a-nigh, attracted by the discussion; 'in the name of the Vargin, what is them?'
Just at this juncture, the eaves-dropping by-stander who furnishes the mem. of this, came away, leaving the emerald son—more verdant to look at than his native isle—staring as if in a fit of astronomy, in eclipse-time.
One of my autumnal recreations, good my reader, is hunting. I pull a most fatal trigger. Venerie delighteth me, when the day is good and the game abundant. I love, (heaven forgive me!) to bring down the squirrel, with the half-munched chestnut in his teeth, what time his bushy tail, (no longer waving in triumph over his back, as he bounds from limb to limb,) quivers in articulo mortis. I confess me none of your cockney venators. Some of these I have seen place the deadly muzzle of a double-barrel rifle at the unsuspecting tail of a wren, while the proximity of metal and feathers was less than an inch; and when they fired, they plunged back some several yards, overcome with horror, though the bird had flown without injury, save indeed some blackened down, in extremis—a trifle, with life safe, and the world before her.
The poetry of gunpowder is in making it tell. To go out when the woods are so beautiful that you deem a score of dying dolphins hang on every tree,
'When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the leaves are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill;'