Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/280

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country I now lived in was new, and abounded with every sort of game common to a new settlement. Wages were dollar, and I could sometimes earn a dollar and a half a day by doing job work on Sunday. The price of a day's work here was a dollar. My master paid me regularly and fairly for all the work I did for him on Sunday, and I never went anywhere else to procure work. All his other hands were treated in the same way. He also gave me an old gun that had seen much hard service, for the stock was quite shattered to pieces, and the lock would not strike fire. I took my gun to a blacksmith in the neighborhood, and he repaired the lock, so that my musket was as sure fire as any piece need be. I found upon trial that though the stock and lock had been worn out, the barrel was none the worse for the service it had undergone.

I now, for the first time ir my life, became a hunter, in the proper sense of the word; and generally