Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/216

198 and no small disappointment; but I had seen the shot fired, and that was something—as is plain from the fact that I remember it so vividly these many years afterward. The names of the principal towns of Indiana long ago folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away, but I can still see that shoemaker running out of his shop.

It was a common practice, I was to learn as I grew older, for shoemakers to keep a loaded gun standing in a corner, ready for such contingencies. There was a tradition in the town that a certain man (I have forgotten his name, or I would bracket it with Mr. Roosevelt's) had once brought down a goose in this way. It is by no means impossible; for flocks of geese were an everyday sight in the season (I am sure I have seen twenty in an afternoon), and sometimes, in thick weather, they almost grazed the chimney-tops. Geese (of that kind) have grown sadly fewer since then, and perhaps have learned to fly higher.

After the hunting reminiscences would likely enough come a discussion of fast horses, Flora Temple and others—includ-