Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/215

Rh of his thermometer at the least possible expense of veracity.

So far things were not very exciting, though on the whole rather more so, perhaps, than studying a geography lesson (as if it were anything to me which were the principal towns in Indiana!); but now, not unlikely, the conversation would shift to hunting exploits. This was more to the purpose. Wonderful game had been shot, first and last, down there in the Old Colony; almost everything, it seemed to a listening boy, except lions and elephants. If Mr. Roosevelt had lived in those times, he need not have gone to the Rocky Mountains in search of adventure.

I listened with both ears. There never was a boy who did not like to hear of doings with a gun. I remember still one of my very early excitements in that line. I was on my way home at noon when a flock of geese flew directly over the street, honking loudly. At that moment a shoemaker ran out of his little shop, gun in hand, and aiming straight upward, let go a charge. Nothing dropped, to my intense surprise