University of Virginia Library

6. VI.

In this way, making new discoveries daily, and
gradually becoming known himself, though vaguely,
to the simple cottagers around him, he continued
to pass the time with something more of satisfaction
than before; though still suffering pain at
every stroke of the sharp and smiting axe, as it
called up the deploring echoes of the rapidly yielding
forest. Day and night he was busy, and he
resumed, in extenso, many of the playful humors,
which used to annoy the savages and compel their
homage. It is true, the acknowledgment of the
white man was essentially different from that commonly
made by the Indians. When their camppots
were broken, their hatchets blunted, their
bows and arrows warped, or they had suffered any
other such mischief at his hands, they solemnly
deprecated his wrath, and offered him tribute to

disarm his hostility. All that Logoochie could
extort from the borderer, was a sullen oath, in
which the tricksy spirit was identified with no less
a person than the devil, the Opitchi-Manneyto
of the southern tribes. This — as Logoochie
well knew the superior rank of that personage
with his people — he esteemed a compliment; and
its utterance was at all times sufficiently grateful
in his ears to neutralize his spleen at the moment.
In addition to this, the habit of smoking more frequently
and freely than the Indians, so common
to the white man, contributed wonderfully to commend
him to the favor of Logoochie. The odor
in his nostrils was savory in the extreme, and he
consequently regarded the smoker as tendering, in
this way, the deprecatory sacrifice, precisely as
the savages had done before him. So grateful,
indeed, was the oblation to his taste, that often, of
the long summer evening, would he gather himself
into a bunch, in the thick branches of the high
tree overhanging the long-house, to inhale the reeking
fumes that were sent up by the half oblivious
woodman, as he lay reposing under its grateful
shadow.