And I started out to learn how to be one. I saw a
bird sitting on a dead limb of a high tree, singing away with his head
tilted back and his mouth open--and, before I thought, I fired my gun
at him; his song stopped all suddenly, and he fell from the branch,
limp like a rag, and I ran and picked him up--and he was dead. His
body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about this way and that,
like as if his neck was broke, and there was a white skin over his
eyes, and one drop of red blood sparkled on the side of his
head-and-laws! I couldn't see nothing for the tears."
"I haven't ever murdered no creature since then that warn't doing me
no harm--and I ain't agoing to neither."
A good Scout is generally a good "ornithologer," as Mark Twain calls
him. That is to say, he likes stalking birds and watching all that
they do. He discovers, by watching them, where and how they build
their nests.
He does not, like the ordinary boy, want to go and rob them of their
eggs, but he likes to watch how they hatch out their young and teach
them to feed themselves and to fly.
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