asked my wife to excuse our “absence without leave,” and after submitting to her gentle reprimand, I explained my plan for a sledge, which pleased her greatly, and she already imagined it loaded with her hogshead of butter, and on its way from Tentholm to Falconhurst.
The chest proved to be merely that of a common sailor, containing his clothes, very much wetted by the sea water.
The boys exhibited an array of several dozen birds, and related, during breakfast, the various incidents of failure and success which had attended their guns. Ernest had rightly guessed the mistakes they would make, but practice was making them perfect, and they seemed disposed to continue their sport, when their mother, assuring them that she could not use more birds than those already killed, asked if I did not think some means of snaring them might be contrived, as much powder and shot would be expended if they fired on at this rate.
Entirely agreeing with this view of the subject, I desired the lads to lay aside their guns for the present, and the younger ones readily applied themselves to making snares of the long threads drawn from the leaves of the karatas in a simple way I taught them, while Fritz and Ernest gave me substantial assistance in the manufacture of the new sledge.
We were busily at work, when a tremendous disturbance among our fowls led us to suppose that a fox or wild cat had got into their midst.
The cocks crowed defiantly, the hens fluttered and cackled in a state of the wildest excitement. We hastened towards them, but Ernest remarking Master Knips slipping away, as though conscious of some misdemeanour, went to watch him, and presently caught him in the act of eating a new-laid egg, which he had carried off and hidden among the grass and roots. Ernest found several others. These were very welcome to my wife, for hitherto the hens had not presented us with any eggs. Hereafter
