So far things were not very exciting, though on the whole rather more so, perhaps, than studying a geography lesson (as if it were anything to me which were the principal towns in Indiana!); but now, not unlikely, the conversation would shift to hunting exploits. This was more to the purpose. Wonderful game had been shot, first and last, down there in the Old Colony; almost everything, it seemed to a listening boy, except lions and elephants. If Mr. Roosevelt had lived in those times, he need not have gone to the Rocky Mountains in search of adventure. I listened with both ears. There never was a boy who did not like to hear of doings with a gun. I remember still one of my very early excitements in that line. I was on my way home at noon when a flock of geese flew directly over the street, honking loudly. At that moment a shoemaker ran out of his little shop, gun in hand, and aiming straight upward, let go a charge. Nothing dropped, to my intense surprise and no small disappointment; but I had seen the shot fired, and that was something--as is plain from the fact that I remember it so vividly these many years afterward. The names of the principal towns of Indiana long ago folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away, but I can still see that shoemaker running out of his shop. It was a common practice, I was to learn as I grew older, for shoemakers to keep a loaded gun standing in a corner, ready for such contingencies. There was a tradition in the town that a certain man (I have forgotten his name, or I would bracket it with Mr. Roosevelt’s) had once brought down a goose in this way. It is by no means impossible; for flocks of geese were an everyday sight in the season (I am sure I have seen twenty in an afternoon), and sometimes, in thick weather, they almost grazed the chimney-tops. Geese (of that kind) have grown sadly fewer since then, and perhaps have learned to fly higher. After the hunting reminiscences would likely enough come a discussion of fast horses, Flora Temple and others--including “Mart” So-and-So’s of our village; or possibly (and this I liked best of all, I think), the conversation would flag, and old Jason Andcut would begin whistling softly to himself. Then I was all ears. Such a tone as he had, especially in the lower register! And such trills and bewitching turns of melody! Why, it was almost as good as the Weymouth Band, which in those days was every whit as famous as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is now. When it played the “Wood-up Quickstep” or “Departed Days,” the whole town was moved, and one boy that I knew was almost in heaven.