One pleasant fall morning in 1892 I was writing in the gun-room, on the top floor of the house, from the windows of which one can see far over the Sound. Suddenly my small boy of five bustled up in great excitement to tell me that the hired-man had come back from the wood-pile pond—a muddy pool in a beech and hickory grove a few hundred yards from the house—to say that he had seen a coon and that I should come down at once with my rifle; for Davis, the colored gardener, had been complaining much about the loss of his chickens and did not know whether the malefactor was a coon or a mink. Accordingly, I picked up a rifle and trotted down to the pond holding it in one hand, while the little boy trotted after me, affectionately clasping the butt. Sure enough, in a big blasted chestnut close to the pond was the coon, asleep in a shallow hollow of the trunk, some forty feet from the ground. It was a very exposed place for a coon to lie during the day-time, but this was a bold fellow and seemed entirely undisturbed by our voices. He was altogether too near the house, or rather the chicken-coops, to be permitted to stay where he was—especially as but a short time before I had, with mistaken soft-heartedness, spared a possum I found on the place—and accordingly I raised my rifle; then I remembered for the first time that the rear sight was off, as I had taken it out for some reason; and in consequence I underwent the humiliation of firing two or three shots in vain before I got the coon. As he fell out of the tree the little boy pounced gleefully on him; fortunately he was dead, and we walked back to the house in triumph, each holding a hind leg of the quarry. The possum spoken of above was found in a dogwood tree not more than eighty yards from the house, one afternoon when we were returning from a walk in the woods. As something had been killing the hens, I felt that it was at least under suspicion and that I ought to kill it, but a possum is such an absurd creature that I could not resist playing with it for some time; after that I felt that to kill it in cold-blood would be too much like murder, and let it go. This tender-heartedness was regarded as much misplaced both by farmer and gardener; hence the coon suffered. A couple of years later, on a clear, cold Thanksgiving Day, we had walked off some five miles to chop out a bridle-path which had become choked with down-timber; the two elder of our little boys were with us. The sun had set long ere our return; we were walking home on a road through our own woods and were near the house. We had with us a stanch friend, a large yellow dog, which one of the children, with fine disregard for considerations of sex, had named Susan. Suddenly Susan gave tongue off in the woods to one side and we found he had treed a possum. This time I was hardhearted and the possum fell a victim; the five-year-old boy explaining to the seven-year-old that “it was the first time he had ever seen a fellow killed.”