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73 10 The Onondaga Street House Our new house was somewhat larger than the other, [with] a high stoop basement, two stories, and a most attractive garret. There was also a considerable frame addition in the rear, a woodshed with finished rooms over it. The garret was promptly preempted in memory of the grand one in Homer and became a new realm of work for me. There was a general likeness between this and the Fayette Street house, externally, and another in the fact that both were infested with large Norway rats upon which I might now and then practice with my gun, which my grandfather had permitted me to bring with me. Here, however the yards, fore, side, and aft, were larger and more susceptible of improvement, if hencoops are to be regarded as entitled to that ascription. Hardly were we settled before there came one more reminder of my earlier experiences. Warren Street, at the left, was only the continuation of the old stage road down the valley to the Indian Reservation and the red men and their families were frequent visitors in Syracuse. It offered them their best market for berries, moccasins, bows, small game, and other products of their otherwise not very well tilled acres. Before long they became frequent visitors at our house and my old interest in and studies of them were renewed. Added to this was the fact that only one square beyond Salina Street on the right was Onondaga Creek, with the pond just below, as near to me as had been the Tioughneauga, and about as hopeless a stream to fish in. I was never to own a boat on it although I once did build one, with immense toil, and it positively refused to float after I dragged it to the creek and launched it. I had not acquired the art of shipbuilding at 74 the onondaga street house that time and many of the ships which I afterwards built and sent to sea did not come back again. I shall not attempt any tedious and useless accuracy concerning precise dates, but if I were to attempt to correct my cloudy chronology at this point, I should place our entry into our new home on the first of May, in the middle of my eleventh year, leaving behind me a year and a half in the Fayette Street house. That may have been the reason why so soon afterwards I seem to have had a long Summer vacation for purposes of exploration in the neighborhood and elsewhere. Be that as it may, I was well supplied with powder and shot and my head was filled with the legends which I had heard concerning the many attractions of Onondaga Lake and the forests around its western shore. The eastern shore was occupied by villages, farms, saltworks, and I took no manner of interest in its somewhat shabby civilization. Only the village of Salina had attractions, for in the edge of it boats were to be obtained and in it were the residences of several families whom I knew and liked. The lake may be somewhat over six miles long and at its widest place about two miles wide. In Summer it contains any amount of undisturbed fishing and in Winter it often affords good skating. In very cold Winters it sometimes also furnishes a fine temporary horserace track. In Spring and Fall, the wild ducks and geese gather here to discuss the propriety of a southern trip and numbers of them go to the Syracuse markets instead. Their interruptions, for the greater part, are occasioned by what some sportsmen deride as “pothunters” and the favorite ducking method of these gentlemen requires a small flock of wooden decoy ducks. When these deceptions are anchored at point-blank range from the shore, the real birds, in search of companionship, will come and alight among them. The man with a gun, hidden behind a breastwork of bushes, then has them almost at his mercy, but I saw one eager shooter fall into a kind of trap, once. I was tramping along the lakeshore and caught a glimpse of a fine flock of decoys, bobbing up and down upon the water at some distance beyond me. At the same moment I espied an excited young man in pretty good clothes who was stooping, creeping, and dodging from tree to tree in his eager haste to reach that point upon the shore. He succeeded in doing...

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