“Game, indeed, that’s what city folks call it; and with them it means chippen-birds and bitterns; maybe such trash live in my diggins, but I arn’t noticed them yet: a bird any way is too trifling. I never did shoot at but one, and I’d never forgiven myself for that, had it weighed less than forty pounds. I wouldn’t draw a rifle on anything less than that; and when I meet with another wild turkey of the same weight I’ll drap him.” “A wild turkey weighing forty pounds!” exclaimed twenty voices in the cabin at once. “Yes, strangers, and wasn’t it a whopper? You see, the thing was so fat that it couldn’t fly far; and when he fell out of the tree, after I shot him, on striking the ground he bust open, and the way the pound gobs of tallow rolled out of the opening was perfectly beautiful.” “Where did all that happen?” asked a cynical-looking Hoosier. “Happen! happened in Arkansaw: where else could it have happened, but in the creation state, the finishing-up country—a state where the _sile_ runs down to the centre of the ’arth, and Government gives you a title to every inch of it? Then its airs—just breathe them, and they will make you snort like a horse. It’s a state without a fault, it is.” “Excepting mosquitoes,” cried the Hoosier. “Well, stranger, except them; for it ar a fact that they are rather _enormous_, and do push themselves in somewhat troublesome. But, stranger, they never stick twice in the same place; and give them a fair chance for a few months, and you will get as much above noticing them as an alligator. They can’t hurt my feelings, for they lay under the skin; and I never knew but one case of injury resulting from them, and that was to a Yankee: and they take worse to foreigners, any how, than they do to natives. But the way they used that fellow up! first they punched him until he swelled up and busted; then he sup-per-a-ted, as the doctor called it, until he was as raw as beef; then he took the ager, owing to the warm weather, and finally he took a steam-boat, and left the country. He was the only man that ever took mosquitoes at heart that I know of. But mosquitoes is natur, and I never find fault with her. If they ar large, Arkansaw is large, her varmints ar large, her trees ar large, her rivers ar large, and a small mosquitoe would be of no more use in Arkansaw than preaching in a cane-brake.” This knock-down argument in favour of big mosquitoes used the Hoosier up, and the logician started on a new track, to explain how numerous bear were in his “diggins,” where he represented them to be “about as plenty as blackberries, and a little plentifuler.” Upon the utterance of this assertion, a timid little man near me inquired if the bear in Arkansaw ever attacked the settlers in numbers.