whose bite does not loosen even when its head is cut off, makes it one kind of "wild game" too many!
Ward himself is a native growth of "American," in which I take a patriotic delight. The country's reliance, for energy in daily matters and for resource and courage in emergencies, is in the likes of him—few though they be, and yet constituting the centre that holds together the whole wheel of our national energy. His life is to mind his business. He says little—his ideas always keeping ahead of his words. What practical knowledge he needed, he has "come at" by a shorter cut than books, having had no education, and yet doing everything with a "knack" that works like science. At present he is building himself a boat, "just to pass a spare month of the winter," and he thinks no more of that untaught exercise of his ingenuity than an Irishman of peeling a fresh potato. With his early savings (as a sloop-skipper and steamboat pilot), he bought the river farm of which Idlewild was a part, and has since turned everything to account within reach—supplying Newburgh and New York with shad and bass in immense quantities by his skillful hauling and netting, growing the best fruit, stopping the drift-timber after the freshets, killing more wild game than all the other neighbors together, raising famous grain, breeding the best fowls and pigs, and—taking summer boarders. With all this variety of tribute-levying upon
