I feel the bitterest animosity toward you at this moment--bothering me in this way, when I can do nothing but sneeze and rage and snort pocket-handkerchiefs to atoms.

If I had you in range of my nose now I would blow your brains out.
TO RAISE POULTRY -- [Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a complimentary membership upon the author.

Written about 1870.] Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready sympathy in my breast.

Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels.

By the time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry than any one individual in all the section round about there.