There is a potent charm in those words, which can iron the wrinkles out of an old brow, and soften the hard lines in the face of a careworn professional or business man. Not long ago I attended a dinner given by the Camp-Fire Club, and there I found ranged around the table an array of veteran hunters. There were men there who had hunted the royal Bengal tiger in the jungles of India, men who had fought with rogue elephants, men who had followed the lions to their dens in Africa, men who had tracked the white bear to its lair in the far frozen North. There were gentlemen who hunted for pleasure, cowboys and scouts--Coquina Shields, “Wolf” Thompson, “Curio” Brown, “Yellowstone” Kelly, Andrew J. Stone, and many others equally well-known in the forests or on the plains were seated at the big round table.[3] That they were real simon-pure sportsmen could be seen at a glance, and yet, when the after-dinner speeches were made, the sentiments which received the most enthusiastic applause were those which DENOUNCED THE KILLING OF MAN OR BEAST. It could readily be seen that these men only used the gun when it was necessary to procure food or in self-defence. They all indorsed the use of the camera for the hunt in place of the murderous gun; as one of them remarked, “With a kodak every good shot is registered with the click of the shutter, and an album of good shots is a thing of which any man may be proud.” With a little private zoo of captured live game you may have a living album, which attests the skill of the collector and his knowledge of woodcraft as accurately as any album of photographs. The next chapter tells how to build a back-yard zoo, and now we must learn how to stock one. If the reader will examine the plans in the chapter mentioned, he will see that there is one compartment marked [Illustration: Making a Capture.] “Receiving-Cage.” This is the place where our new captures find temporary shelter until their regular quarters are prepared for them. The most accessible game for boys belongs to the Rodents or Gnawers. These animals can be readily distinguished by their long, chisel-like front teeth. A familiar example of this family may be found in every town and city, and is known as the common rat, the Norway rat, or the brown rat. Formerly the common rat of the United States was black, but his brown relative has about exterminated the more graceful black one. The only black rat I ever saw was a dead one, which I found one summer in an unoccupied house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. But there are plenty of beautiful little gnawers around us everywhere. There are the soft, furry, big-eyed flying-squirrels, which leave their warm nests at dusk and sail through the air from tree to tree, or romp among the branches until daylight. Just at dawn they return to their beds, to sleep away the day in their dark holes, secure from the garish sunlight.