Or, when
any of my cousins came,--boys near my own age,--what joy filled
the days! And when they went, how lonesome I would be! how forlorn
all things looked till the second or third day! I early developed
a love of comrades, and was always fond of company--and am yet, as
the records of Slabsides show.
I was quite a hunter in my youth, as most farm boys are, but I
never brought home much game--a gray squirrel, a partridge, or a
wild pigeon occasionally. I think with longing and delight of
the myriads of wild pigeons that used to come every two or three
years--covering the sky for a day or two, and making the naked
spring woods gay and festive with their soft voices and fluttering
blue wings. I have seen thousands of them go through a beech wood,
like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting beechnuts. Those in the
rear would be constantly flying over those in front, so that the
effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and blue and
brown, rustling and murmuring as it went. One spring afternoon vast
flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when some
of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the
roadside. A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split
off and, with a downward wheel and rush, join those in the wood.
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