At the time we visited his place, he was driving a thriving trade, and
all the wheat that was grown in the neighbourhood was brought by water
to be ground at Y----'s mill. He had lost his wife a few years after
coming to the country; but his two daughters, Betty and Norah, were
excellent housewives, and amply supplied her loss. From these amiable
women we received a most kind and hearty welcome, and every comfort
and luxury within their reach. They appeared a most happy and contented
family. The sons--a fine, hardy, independent set of fellows--were
regarded by the old man with pride and affection. Many were his
anecdotes of their prowes in hunting and fishing. His method of giving
them an aversion to strong drink while very young amused me greatly, but
it is not every child that could have stood the test of his experiment.
“When they were little chaps, from five to six years of age, I made them
very drunk,” he said; “so drunk that it brought on severe headache and
sickness, and this so disgusted them with liquor, that they never could
abide the sight of it again. I have only one drunkard among the seven;
and he was such a weak, puling crathur, that I dared not play the same
game with him, lest it should kill him. 'Tis his nature, I suppose, and
he can't help it; but the truth is, that to make up for the sobriety of
all the rest, he is killing himself with drink.”
Norah gave us an account of her catching a deer that had got into the
enclosure the day before.
“I went out,” she said, “early in the morning, to milk the cows, and I
saw a fine young buck struggling to get through a pale of the fence,
in which having entangled his head and horns, I knew, by the desperate
efforts he was making to push aside the rails, that if I was not quick
in getting hold of him, he would soon be gone.”
“And did you dare to touch him?”
“If I had had Mat's gun I would have shot him, but he would have made
his escape long before I could run to the house for that, so I went
boldly up to him and got him by the hind legs; and though he kicked and
struggled dreadfully, I held on till Mat heard me call, and ran to
my help, and cut his throat with his hunting-knife. So you see,”
she continued, with a good-natured laugh, “I can beat our hunters
hollow--they hunt the deer, but I can catch a buck with my hands.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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