Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/109



12th of October was a day. There are few like it in our Massachusetts calendar. And by a stroke of good fortune I had chosen it for a trip to Eagle Hill, on the North Shore. All things were near perfection; the only drawbacks to my enjoyment being a slight excess of warmth and an unseasonable plague of mosquitoes.

"Yes, it is too fine," said the stable-keeper, who drove me down from the railroad station. "It won't last. It's what we call a weather breeder."

"So be it," thought I. Just then I was not concerned with to-morrow. Happy men seldom are. The stable-keeper spoke more to the purpose when he told me that during the recent storm a most exceptional number of birds had been driven in. A certain gunner, Cy Somebody, had shot twenty-odd dollars' worth in one day. "There he is now,"