Then in a voice he was training for future fox hunts Tommy Earle yelled, and the woods and the house and the barn between them tossed back and forth the thin echoes. II PARADISE REGAINED Little Tommy Earle stood on tiptoe in the rear of the capacious hall of his father's barn, and glanced excitedly along the nickel-plated barrel of his air rifle, which he had poked through a knot hole. Out there on the ground between the barn and the corn field he had sprinkled some crumbs of bread. When sparrows came to pick up those crumbs--well, thought Tommy, it would be hard on the sparrows. Behind him in the straw that carpeted the barn lay old Frank, Irish setter, taking his ease. Except during hunting season, wherever you found the boy you found old Frank. Now and then, at some slight movement of the boy, he pricked his ears in the direction of this miniature stalker of game. The rest of the time he either dozed off, or, suddenly aroused, snapped at a fly with that fierce look in his eyes with which dogs and fly-swatting women view these buzzing pests. Cathedral-high above them towered the overflowing hay loft. Through the wide-open doors behind them the barn lot blazed in the afternoon sun. The somnolence of a farmyard mid-afternoon brooded over the scene. Only the boy, peering through the knothole, was tense and vibrant. For him this was a serious occasion. He had owned the air gun two weeks now, and he hadn't killed a thing. True, he had hit an upstairs window pane, but he hadn't intended to do that. He had merely shot at a raucous jaybird in a tree, and the upstairs window pane, the innocent bystander, as it were, had fallen inward with a sharp tinkle of broken glass. The mishap had brought down on him the warning from his father that if it, or any similar exploit, were repeated, the air gun would be confiscated. "But I didn't mean to, Papa!" he had cried. "That doesn't make any difference, old man," Steve Earle had said; "the window is broken all the same." The boy had walked away from the interview, sobered. Sprung from the loins of generations of hunters, the love of a gun was in his blood, and this air rifle was his first love. Since the warning he had used the horizon as a backstop for all his shots. Old Frank, who had followed him around at first, pricking his ears at every shot, ready to bring in the game, had concluded that there would be no game to bring in, and had lost interest at last. Then, just an hour ago, the boy had hit upon this scheme of baiting sparrows to their doom. And now with the patience of the born hunter, tireless like the patience of the cat watching at the mouse hole, he waited for sparrows to come. His face was flushed, his eyes were shining, the smooth muscles of his bare, sturdy legs were knotted as he stood a-tiptoe, peering.