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82 the frenzy of his terror he had done the wisest thing imaginable, and taken in fact the only feasible and proper course to get himself well out of a bad scrape.

My hunter friend was just a little soured in spirit by a misadventure of his own that morning. In company with a young man from the city, who came well recommended as a good shot and energetic hunter, he had started out at daybreak into the mountains in search of deer. They were going up a narrow trail along the bottom of a thick-wooded canon, when a deer, startled by their footsteps, sprang up within ten feet of them and darted away with tremendous bounds through the bushes. The young man, startled out of his seven senses by the sudden appearance of the deer, had been seized with the "buck fever," and discharging his rifle at random without the slightest idea what he was about, came within an ace of blowing his companion's head off. For this he had received a blessing, and an intimation that thenceforth their paths were separated, and the more widely the better.

This "buck fever" is one of the most violent diseases which ever attacked the human system. The story of the Southern planter who placed his negro servant in ambush, and then, ordering him to fire the moment he got a fair sight at the deer, drove a fine buck directly down the ravine past him, is familiar, I presume, to most of my readers. As the buck dashed past him the negro rose to his feet, when the frightened animal made a tremendous bound, clearing a clump of bushes and a fallen tree-top,