It's a good place to loaf, and we'll take John Ware along as our moral uplifter.

Maybe we'll pot a few ducks, but if we don't we'll get away from our troubles for a little while anyhow." The house-boat proved to be commodious and comfortable, and the ducks scarce enough to make the hunter earn his supper.

I may say in parenthesis that long before Thatcher's day many great and good Hoosiers scattered birdshot over the Kankakee marshes--which, alack! have been drained to increase Indiana's total area of arable soil.

"Lew" Wallace and other Hoosier generals and judges used to hunt ducks on the Kankakee; and Maurice Thompson not only camped there, but wrote a poem about the marshes,--a poem that _is_ a poem,--all about the bittern and the plover and the heron, which always, at the right season, called him away from the desk and the town to try his bow (he was the last of the toxophilites!) on winged things he scorned to destroy with gunpowder.
(Oh what a good fellow you were, Maurice Thompson, and what songs you wrote of our lakes and rivers and feathered things! And how I gloated over those songs of fair weather in old "Atlantics" in my grandfather's garret, before they were bound into that slim, long volume with the arrow-pierced heron on its cover!) John Ware, an ancient and honorable son of the tribe of Nimrod, was the best of comrades.

The striking quality in Ware was his beautiful humanness, which had given him a peculiar hold upon men.