"Hyops!" said Sandboys. "Planked shad is very good, but it can't hold a candle to planked salmon. But, as I was tellin' you, the place was full of moose too. They used to catch 'em and train 'em to go in harness. I don't believe anybody up there ever thought of buying a horse or a team of oxen to pull their wagons and plough their fields, moose were so plenty, and, when you could catch 'em hungry, so easy to tame. They'd hitch 'em to the plough, for instance, with ropes tied to their horns, and drive 'em around all day, and when night came they weren't a bit tired. But sometimes daddy said they'd strike a fearfully wild one, and then there'd be trouble. Pop told me he hitched one up to the harrow once, and the thing got a wild fit on and started across the field prancin' like a Rocky Mountain goat. He pulled up all the fences in his way with the harrow's teeth, and before he stopped he'd gone right through my grandfather's bay-window, into the dinin'-room, out the back door into the kitchen, takin' all the tables and chiny in the place with him. Where he went to nobody ever knew, though the harrow was found on top o' one of the mountains about sixty miles away, three years afterwards. I'd tell you the name of the mountain, only it had one o' those French-Canadian names too, so of course I can't. [Illustration] "Time went on, and pop got to be a pretty big boy, and on his thirteenth birthday his father gave him the gun he'd used in the war--the war of the Revylation, I think it was, when George Washington was runnin' things. With it he gave him a powder-flask and some bullets, and I tell you pop was proud, and crazy to go huntin'. His father wasn't anxious to let him, though, until he thought pop knew enough about fire-arms to kill something besides himself, and he told him no, he couldn't. He must wait awhile. So pop tried to be good and obey, but that gun was too much for him. It kept hintin', 'Let's go huntin'--let's go huntin',' and one night pop could not resist it any longer. So after everybody'd gone to bed, he got up, sneaked down stairs into the parlor, took down the gun from the bricky-brack rack, and set out for the lonely woods. [Illustration]