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“Prehaps,” said he, “gentlemen,” running on without a person interrupting, “prehaps you have been to New Orleans often; I never madethe first visit before, and I don’t intend to make another in a crow’s life. I am thrown away in that ar place, and useless, that ar a fact. Some of the gentlemen thar called me green well, prehaps I am, said I, but I arn’t so at home;and if I ain’t off my trail much, the heads of them perlite chaps themselves wern’t much the hardest; for according to my notion, they were real know- nothings,green as a pumpkin-vine couldn’t, in farming, I’ll bet, raise a crop of turnips; and as for shooting, they’d miss a barn if the door was swinging, and that, too, with the best rifle in the country. And then they talked to me ’bout hunting, and laughed at my calling the principal game in Arkansaw poker, and high-low-jack.

“‘Prehaps,’ said I, ‘you prefer checkers and roulette;’ at this they laughed harder than ever, and asked me if I lived in the woods, and didn’t know what gamewas?

“At this, I rather think Ilaughed.

“‘Yes,’ I roared, and says, I, ‘Strangers, if you’d ask me how we got our meat in Arkansaw, l’d a told you at once, and given you a list of varmints that would make a caravan, beginning with the bar, and ending off with the cat; that’s meat though, not game.

“Game, indeed, that’s what city folks call it; and with them it means chipper-birds and shite-pokes; may be such trash live in my digging, but I arn’t noticed them yet: a bird anyway 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 heavy than that; and when I meet with another wild turkey of the same size, I will crap him.”

“A wild turkey weighing forty pounds!” exclaimed twentyvoices in the cabin at once.

“Yes, strangers, and wasn’t it a whopper? You see, the thing was so fat that it couldn’t flyfar; and when he fell out of the tree, after I shot him, on striking the ground he bust open behind, and the way the pound gobs of tallow rolled out of the opening was perfectlybeautiful.”

“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 withouta 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, owing to the warm weather, he tuck the ager, and finally he tuck a steamboat and left the country. He was the only man that ever tuck mosquitoes at heart that I knowd of.