There are dogs called 'coon-dogs, but of no particular breed or pedigree. A local pack will consist of Rag, Tag, and Bobtail, with all of Bobtail's friends and connections. One of them is known to be best and takes the lead. They call him the trailer. The rest rush yelping after, and as fast as possible follow the hunters, with torches or lanterns or by moonlight, carrying axes and hatchets, guns, and antidotes for snake-bite in flat, black bottles. Trailer's motley crew catch a sniff of the trail and disappear in the darkness of the brushy woods, baying, barking, yelping, squealing, each after its kind. After them go the whooping hunters, following by ear as the dogs do by nose, for none can use the sense of sight.

Finally a chorus of eager barking in a different tone from what has thus far been heard announces to experienced ears that the dogs have some game at bay. The hunters dispute as to what it is as they crash and stagger on through the gloom, each swearing he knows by his cur's voice what sort of an animal he has in view. Arrived at the scene of the clamor, the dogs are found in frantic excitement around the foot of a tree, in whose shadowy foliage something is supposed to be hidden. Will it be a 'coon, or will it turn out a 'possum, a wild-cat, or mayhap an owl?

First of all a fire is lighted, and its upreaching blaze sends fitful rays of yellow light far among the overhanging branches. Now there may be discerned a hollow near the summit of the trunk, and as dead branches are heaped upon the fire, sharp eyes may detect a triangular head peering out of what was once, perhaps, the front door of a woodpecker's home, and the glints of green are reported to be the glare of a raccoon's eyes.

The nimblest man in the party is sent up the tree, and given a stick wherewith to frighten or poke or pry the cornered animal out of his castle. Compelled to leave the hole, it creeps out upon a limb, and squatting down, snarls at the stranger, who tries to shake loose its hold. But this is a vain attempt. A raccoon can cling like a burr. Try to drag your pet 'coon off the top of a fence, and if he chooses to resist, you may pull him limb from limb before he will let go. So they take the severer method of chopping the branches, until the poor little beast has none left to clutch in falling, and comes down a heap of fur and teeth and claws into the midst of the dogs. Instantly there follows a scrimmage, where often an honest bark is changed in the middle to a yelp of pain, until many a time the melee changes to a ring of hurt and angry but vanquished curs around a 'coon lying on his back, with bloody teeth and claws ready to try it again; and then he is shot by the hunters, merciless to the last. More often the whole tree must be cut down, and the brave 'coon falls with it, and is dashed out among his enemies to fight for his life at the end of his fall.

—ERNEST INGERSOLL (adapted).

[Footnote: What does the phrase "the trails would grow cold" mean? What sense would you find most active if you were on the coon-hunt? Does the author write as an enthusiastic hunter? What impresses you most in the account: the fun or the cruelty of hunting? Does the author succeed in giving you an idea of the excitement of coon-hunting? Would the account have any added interest if it were told in the first person?]



SIGHT IN SAVAGES

In Patagonia [Footnote: Patagonia: the southern part of Argentine Republic.] I added something to my small stock of private facts concerning eyes—their appearance, color, and expression—and vision, subjects which have had a mild attraction for me as long as I can remember. When, as a boy, I mixed with the gauchos [Footnote: Gauchos: these people are of Spanish-American descent. They are the native inhabitants of the pampas, and live chiefly by cattle-raising.] of the pampas, [Footnote: Pampas: vast plains in the southern part of South America, chiefly in the Argentine Republic.] there was one among them who greatly awed me by his appearance and character. He was distinguished among his fellows by his tallness, the thickness of his eyebrows and the great length of his crow-black beard, the form and length of his "facon," or knife, which was nothing but a sword worn knife-wise, and the ballads he composed, in which were recounted, in a harsh tuneless voice to the strum-strum of a guitar, the hand-to-hand combats he had had with others of his class—fighters and desperadoes—and in which he had always been the victor, for his adversaries had all been slain to a man. But his eyes, his most wonderful feature, impressed me more than anything else; for one was black and the other dark blue. All other strange and extranatural things in nature, of which I had personal knowledge, as, for instance, mushrooms growing in rings, and the shrinking of the sensitive plant when touched, and Will-o'-the-wisps, and crowing hens, and the murderous attack of social birds and beasts on one of their fellows, seemed less strange and wonderful than the fact that this man's eyes did not correspond, but were the eyes of two men, as if there had been two natures and souls in one body. My astonishment was, perhaps, not unaccountable, when we reflect that the eye is to us the window of the mind or soul, that it expresses the soul, and is, as it were, the soul itself materialized.

Some person lately published in England a book entitled "Soul-Shapes," treating not only of the shapes of souls but also of their color. The letter-press of this work interests me less than the colored plates adorning it. Passing over the mixed and vari-colored souls, which resemble, in the illustrations, colored maps in an atlas, we come to the blue soul, for which the author has a very special regard. Its blue is like that of the commonest type of blue eye. This curious fancy of a blue soul probably originated in the close association of eye and soul in the mind. It is worthy of note that while the mixed and other colored souls seem very much out of shape, like an old felt hat or a stranded jelly fish, the pure colored blue soul is round, like an iris, and only wanted a pupil to be made an eye.

Here again I recall an incident of my boyhood, and am not sure that it was not this that first gave me an interest in the subject.

One summer day, at home, I was attentively listening, out of doors, to a conversation between two men, both past middle life and about the same age, one an educated Englishman, wearing spectacles, the other a native, who was very impressive in his manner, and was holding forth in a loud authoritative voice on a variety of subjects. All at once he fixed his eyes on the spectacles worn by the other, and, bursting into a laugh, cried out, "Why do you always wear those eye-hiding glasses straddled across your nose? Are they supposed to make a man look handsomer or wiser than his fellows, or do you, a sensible person, really believe that you can see better than another man because of them? If so, then all I can say is that it is a fable, a delusion; no man can believe such a thing."

He was only expressing the feeling that all persons of his class, whose lives are passed in the semi-barbarous conditions of the gauchos on the pampas, experience at the sight of such artificial helps to vision as spectacles. They look through a pane of glass, and it makes the view no clearer, but rather dimmer—how can the two diminutive circular panes carried before the eyes produce any other effect? Besides, their sight as a rule is good when they are young, and as they progress in life they are not conscious of decadence in it; from infancy to old age the world looks, they imagine, the same; the grass as green, the sky as blue as ever, and the scarlet verbenas in the grass just as scarlet. The man lives in his sight; it is his life; he speaks of the loss of it as a calamity great as the loss of reason. To see spectacles amuses and irritates him at the same time; he has the monkey's impulse to snatch the idle things from his fellow's nose; for not only is it useless to the wearer, and a sham, but it is annoying to others, who do not like to look at a man and not properly see his eyes and the thought that is in them.

To the mocking speech he had made, the other good humoredly replied that he had worn glasses for twenty years, that not only did they enable him to see much better than he could without them, but they had preserved his sight from further decadence. Not satisfied with defending himself against the charge of being a fantastical person for wearing glasses, he in his turn attacked the mocker. "How do you know," he said, "that your own eyesight has not degenerated with time? You can only ascertain that by trying on a number of glasses suited to a variety of sights, all in some degree defective. A score of men with defective sight may be together, and in no two will the sight be the same. You must try on spectacles, as you try on boots, until you find a pair to fit you. You may try mine, if you like; our years are the same, and it is just possible that our eyes may be in the same condition."

The gaucho laughed a loud and scornful laugh, and exclaimed that the idea was too ridiculous. "What, see better with this thing!" and he took them gingerly in his hand, and held them up to examine them, and finally put them on his nose—something in the spirit of the person who takes a newspaper twisted into the shape of an extinguisher, and puts it on his head. He looked at the other, then at me, then stared all round him with an expression of utter astonishment, and in the end burst out in loud exclamations of delight. For, strange to say, the glasses exactly suited his vision, which, unknown to him, had probably been decaying for years. "Angels of heaven, what is this I see!" he shouted. "What makes the trees look so green—they were never so green before! And so distinct—I can count their leaves! And the cart over there—why, it is red as blood!" And to satisfy himself that it had not just been freshly painted, he ran over to it and placed his hand on the wood. It proved hard to convince him that objects had once looked as distinct, and leaves as green, and the sky as blue, and red paint as red, to his natural sight, as they now did through those magical glasses. The distinctness and brightness seemed artificial and uncanny. But in the end he was convinced, and then he wanted to keep the spectacles, and pulled out his money to pay for them there and then, and was very much put out when their owner insisted on having them back. However, shortly afterwards a pair was got for him; and with these on his nose he galloped about the country, exhibiting them to all his neighbors, and boasting of the miraculous power they imparted to his eyes of seeing the world as no one else could see it.

—W.H. HUDSON.

[Footnote: What things in nature do you think most interested the writer? Do you imagine that he would be a good out-of-doors companion? Why? Was the native in the story the sort of person whom you would expect to "hold forth in an authoritative voice on a variety of subjects"? Do you know what the general attitude of the savage and semi-civilized people is toward strange things? Note the rambling, conversational style in which this sketch is written. Compare it with Stevenson, Aldrich, and Edwards. Note the delightfully whimsical quality of the humor. Can you see any likeness in this to Lamb and Hawthorne?]



THE VILLAGE SCHOOLMASTER

In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight [Footnote: Wight: a person.] of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or as he expressed it, "tarried," in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a state which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at the top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

In addition to his other vocations, he was the singing-master of the neighborhood, and picked up many bright shillings by instructing the young folks in psalmody. It was a matter of no little vanity to him on Sundays, to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of chosen singers, where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the palm from the parson. Certain it is his voice resounded far above all the rest of the congregation, and there are peculiar quavers still to be heard in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill-pond, on a still Sunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane. Thus, by divers little makeshifts, in that ingenious way which is commonly denominated "by hook and by crook" the worthy pedagogue got on tolerably enough, and was thought, by all who understood nothing of this labor of head-work, to have a wonderful easy life of it. The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle gentleman-like personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farm-house, and the addition of a supernumerary [Footnote: Supernumerary: superfluous, unnecessary.] dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard, between services on Sundays! gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overrun the surrounding trees, reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent millpond, while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.

From his half-itinerant life, he was a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, [Footnote: Erudition: learning, scholarship.] for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's "History of New England Witchcraft," in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering the little brook that whimpered by his school-house, and there con over old Mather's [Footnote: Cotton Mather: an American clergyman, author, and scholar. Born in 1663, died in 1728. He took an active part in the persecutions for witchcraft.] direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm-house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whippoorwill from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if by chance a huge blackhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet [Footnote: Varlet: rascal.] was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm-tunes; and the good people of Sleepy-Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe at hearing his nasal melody, "in linked sweetness long drawn out," floating from the distant hill or along the dusky road.

Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them wofully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!

But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its face, it was dearly purchased by the terror of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which like a sheeted spectre beset his very path! How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet! and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! and how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings!

—WASHINGTON IRVING.

[Footnote: Is this style of writing similar to that of any other selections you have studied? Illustrate. Compare the kind of words used here with the simple diction in "A Youthful Actor," "In Brittany," "The Gold Trail." Does the author's humor seem to you unkindly? What other selections have you studied in which this sort of humor is shown? What courses of study do you imagine were given in Ichabod's school? Does Ichabod seem a real character or only a caricature?]

THE END