The Sportsman’s Club in the Saddle – eBook

Description

Which is the pleasantest season of the year, boy reader? No doubt you have written more than one composition on the subject, and perhaps you will say, as most boys do, that you like winter best. If you live in the city you can spend your leisure hours at the skating-rink; or it may be that your father owns an ice-boat, and you take great delight in riding in it. Your cousin Tom, who lives in the country, will tell you that winter is the time for him, for he is fond of sleigh-riding, and sees any amount of sport at quiltings, apple-bees, corn-huskings and surprise parties. If you had asked Walter and Eugene Gaylord what they thought about it, Eugene, who was a lively, talkative fellow, would have answered you something like this: We see more real fun in one week during the winter time than in all the rest of the year. The quails, that have been rearing their broods in these fields during the summer, are in prime condition then, and if you ever handled a shot-gun or owned a setter, you know there is no sport in the world like shooting on the wing. Wild turkeys are plenty, also. They come into the hills about here to feed on the beech-nuts. It is time then to set traps for minks and to go coon-hunting. Minks are abundant about here, and their skins are worth two dollars apiece. And then, is there any music in the world that can equal the baying of a hound of a clear, frosty morning? That brier patch down there covers more than two hundred acresfather calls it his preservesit is literally filled with rabbits and foxes, and our club owns a pack of the best hounds in the state. That sheet of water you see over there is an arm of the Gulf of Mexico. I dont exaggerate when I say that I have seen it black with wild geese and ducks. They stay around here during the fall and winter. All the shooting we can do will not frighten them away, for the bay is an excellent feeding-ground, and it never freezes over. You know the winters are not as cold down here as they are up North. Deer are plenty in the swamp, bears are so abundant that they are really troublesome, wild hogs you can find any day, and panthers are killed on our plantation every winter. And then, if every other source of excitement should fail us, there are Bayard Bell and his crowd of fellows, who are bound that the members of our club shall not enjoy a minutes peace if they can help it. You see, while we were students at the Academy at Bellville last summer, our club defeated Bayard and his crew in a four-oared race for the championship, and that made him very angry. More than that, he wanted to be commodore of the academy squadron, but when the election came off he was badly beaten, and that was another thing that made him mad. He has promised to square yards with every one of us this winter, and we are waiting to see what he will do. I like these long evenings, too. When the wind is whistling dismally without, and the rain and sleet are rattling against the window-panes, isnt it jolly to draw up in front of a warm fire, and while away the hours with a game of chess or backgammon with some good fellow, or listen to the stories of Uncle Dick, who has travelled over every portion of the habitable globe? O, we always see plenty of sport during the winter. Two better boys than Walter and Eugene Gaylord never lived, and none ever had a pleasanter home or a kinder father and mother. When we say that they were good boys, we do not mean that they were perfect. We would not give a fig for an army of perfect boys, even if there were such impossible things in the world; but, thank goodness, they do not exist outside of story-books. Walter and Eugene had their faults, and some glaring ones, too, like all other live, wide-awake boys.