The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 53 pages of information about The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 53 pages of information about The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction.
or hugged to death for their pains.  The curs yelp after him, bite his rump, and make him tree, where he can be shot.  The bear of Canada is seldom dangerous.  He is always ready to enter into a treaty, similar to what my Lord Brougham negotiated lately with Lord Londonderry, viz. let-be for let-be—­but if wounded, he is dangerous in the extreme.  You should always, therefore, hunt him in couples, and have a shot in reserve, or a goodly cudgel, ready to apply to the root of his nose, where he is as vulnerable as Achilles was in the heel.  Some ludicrous stories are told of bear-hunting; for Bruin is rather a humorist in his way.  A friend of mine, with his surveying party, ten men in all, once treed a very large one; they immediately cut clubs, and set to work to fell the tree.  Bruin seemed inclined to maintain his position, till the tree began to lean, when he slid down to about fifteen feet from the ground, and then clasped his fore-paws over his head and let himself tumble amongst them.  Every club was raised, but Bruin was on the alert; he made a charge, upset the man immediately in front, and escaped with two or three thumps on the rump, which he valued not one pin.  When once they have killed a pig, if you do not manage to kill the bear, you will never keep one hog; for they will come back till they have taken the last of them;—­they will even invade the sacred precincts of the hog-sty.  An Irishman in the Newcastle district once caught a bear flagrante delicto, dragging a hog over the walls of the pew.  Pat, instead of assailing the bear, thought only of securing his property; so he jumped into the sty, and seized the pig by the tail.  Bruin having hold of the ears, they had a dead pull for possession, till the whillilooing of Pat, joined to the plaintive notes of his protege, brought a neighbour to his assistance, who decided the contest in Pat’s favour by knocking the assailant on the head.—­A worthy friend of mine, of the legal profession, and now high in office in the colony, once, when a young man, lost his way in the woods, and seeing a high stump, clambered up it with the hope of looking around him.  While standing on the top of it for this purpose, his foot slipped, and he was precipitated into the hollow of the tree, beyond the power of extricating himself.  Whilst bemoaning here his hard fate, and seeing no prospect before him, save that of a lingering death by starvation, the light above his head was suddenly excluded, and his view of the sky, his only prospect, shut out by the intervention of a dense medium, and by and by he felt the hairy posteriors of a bear descend upon him.  With the courage of despair he seized fast hold of Bruin behind, and by this means was dragged once more into upper day.  Nothing, surely, but the instinct of consanguinity could have induced Bruin thus to extricate his distressed brother.

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THE CHOLERA IN INDIA.

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The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.