Next morning we found the poor mother
lying about three hundred yards from the place where she was shot. She
had run this distance and jumped a high fence after one of the
buckshot had passed through her heart.
Excepting Sundays we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves,
the 4th of July and the 1st of January. Sundays were less than half
our own, on account of Bible lessons, Sunday-school lessons and church
services; all the others were labor days, rain or shine, cold or warm.
No wonder, then, that our two holidays were precious and that it was
not easy to decide what to do with them. They were usually spent on
the highest rocky hill in the neighborhood, called the Observatory; in
visiting our boy friends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, wrestle, and
play games; in reading some new favorite book we had managed to borrow
or buy; or in making models of machines I had invented.
One of our July days was spent with two Scotch boys of our own age
hunting redwing blackbirds then busy in the corn-fields. Our party had
only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest and perhaps
because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of
carrying.
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