The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Long Hillside, by Thomas Nelson Page
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Title: The Long Hillside
A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia
1908
Author: Thomas Nelson Page
Release Date: November 16, 2007 [EBook #23514]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG HILLSIDE ***
Produced by David Widger
THE LONG HILLSIDE
A CHRISTMAS HARE-HUNT IN OLD VIRGINIA
By Thomas Nelson Page
Charles Scribner's Sons New York, 1908
Copyright, 1891, 1904, 1906
I
There do not seem to be as many hares now as there used to be when I was
a boy. Then the "old fields" and branch-bottoms used to be full of th-
em.
They were peculiarly our game; I mean we used to consider that they
belonged to us boys. They were rather scorned by the "gentlemen," by
which was meant the grown-up gentlemen, who shot partridges over the
pointers, and only picked up a hare when she got in their way. And the
negroes used to catch them in traps or "gums," which were traps made of
hollow gum-tree logs. But we boys were the hare-hunters. They were our
property from our childhood; just as much, we considered, as "Bruno" and
"Don," the beautiful "crack" pointers, with their brown eyes and satiny
ears and coats, were "the gentlemen's."
The negroes used to set traps all the Fall and Winter, and we, with the
natural tendency of boys to imitate whatever is wild and primitive, used
to set traps also. To tell the truth, however, the hares appeared to
have a way of going into the negroes' traps, rather than into ours, and
the former caught many to our one.-