“Father,” he said that very same night, after sitting for hours of wandering, “will you give me a gun and let me take to shooting?” “A gun!” cried Bull Garnet, starting; “a gun, Bob! What do you mean by it?” “I meant nothing at all, father. Only I know the way to stuff birds, and there are some rare ones here sometimes, and I want to make a collection.” “Bob Garnet, as long as I am alive, you never shall have a gun.” “Then, will you lend me yours, father? I know very well how to use it. I mean your patent——” “Never, Bob. My son, if you love me, never speak of it again.” CHAPTER III. When Miss Rosedew and her niece came in to get ready for dinner, Amy cried out suddenly, “Oh, only look at the roses, aunt; how they have opened to–day! What delicious Louise Odier, and just look at General Jacqueminot! and I do declare Jules Margottin is finer than he was at Midsummer. I must cut a few, for I know quite well there will come a great frost if I donʼt, and then where will all my loves be?” Amyʼs prediction about the weather was as random a guess as we may find in great authorities, who are never right, although they give the winds sixteen points of the thirty–two to shuffle in. But it so turned out that the girl was right—a point of the compass never hit till a day too late by our weather–clerks. That very same night such a frost set in as had not been known in October for very nearly a century. It lasted nine nights and eight days; twice the mercury fell more than half way from the freezing point to zero, and the grass was crisp in the shade all day, though the high sun wiped off the whiteness at noon wherever he found the way to it. Boys rejoiced, and went mitching, to slide on the pools of the open furzery: no boys since the time of their great–grandfathers had done the heel–tap in October. But the birds did not appreciate it. What in the world did it mean? Why, there were the hips not ripe yet, and the hollyberries come to no colour, and half the blackberries still too acid, and, lo! it was freezing hard enough to make a worm cold for the stomach, even if you could get him! Surely there was some stupid mistake of two months in the piperʼs almanac. All they could say was that, if it were so, those impudent free–and–easy birds who came sponging on them in the winter—and too stuck up, forsooth! to live with them after sucking all the fat of the land, and winning their daughters’ affections—those outlandish beggars—be hanged to them—had got the wrong almanac too.