"It won't stay all day!" He forgot how to push the ramrod like I showed him, so he reached out and tried to hit it with the gun.
"Don't do that!" I said.
"But it's getting away! It's getting away!" he cried.
"Well, what if it is ?" I asked, half provoked.

"Do you suppose I really would hurt a poor little muskrat?
Maybe it has six hungry babies in its home." "Oh THAT way," he said, but he kept looking at it, so he made me think if I hadn't been there, he would have thrown a stone or hit it with a stick.

It is perfectly wonderful about how some men can't get along without killing things, such little bits of helpless creatures too.

I thought he'd better be got from the jungle, so I invited him to see the place at the foot of the hill below our orchard where some men thought they had discovered gold before the war.

They had been to California in '49, and although they didn't come home with millions, or anything else except sick and tired, they thought they had learned enough about gold to know it when they saw it.
I told him about it and he was interested and anxious to see the place.
If there had been a shovel, I am quite sure he would have gone to digging.