University of Virginia Library

SECOND YEAR.

22. CHAPTER XXII.

Our second summer opened with the electioneering
campaign of Mr. Glenville, the people's candidate for a seat

in the next legislature. His opponent, in all intellectual
respects, was unqualified for the seat, being destitute of important
knowledges, void of tact and skill, and having indeed—for
he had been our representative before—only exposed
himself and us to perpetual ridicule. He could read
and write, and perhaps cipher a little, and therefore, was
all along considered a smart fellow, till it was discovered
we had one in the district, “a powerful heap smarter”—
John Glenville, Esq., of Glenville. For John read without
spelling the hard words, wrote like engraving, and could
“kalkilate in his head faster nor Jerry Simpson with
chalk or coal, although Jerry had been a schoolmaster.”
And our neighbor Ashford offered to stake five barrels of
corn, that—“Johnny was jist the powerfullest smartest feller
in the hole universal county, and could out sifer Jerry
or any other man all to smash.”

Glenville's ability, however, would have prejudiced our
cause, had any doubt existed as to his moral integrity; for,
a bad man out there was very properly dreaded in proportion
to his cleverness,[1] and therefore, power to harm. Indeed,
we always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented
one; and hence attempts were usually made to ruin
the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily
smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally
coupled, and incompetence and goodness.

Our opponents, therefore, neither insisted that Jerry was
smarter than John, nor attacked John's character: but they
contended that “Jerry could do no harm if he did no
good, but that John could if he would, and would if he
took a bad turn; also, that Jerry had been tried once and
did no harm, but that John had never been tried and so no
one could exactly tell what he would be till he was tried.”

To this was answered, that “Jerry could do no good if he
would, and had often voted so as to keep others from doing

us any good, and so had prevented good if he had done no
evil; that John if able to do harm, was also able to do good,
and as he had never done harm in private life, it was reasonable
to believe he would do none in public life; and
that as Jerry had had a trial and did no good, so John ought
to have one too, and if he did harm, we could send Jerry
the year after.”

John was then attacked on the score of pride and aristocracy;
and, as usual, all the sins of his family were laid
at Glenville's door, especially his sisters' ruffles—our metal
buttons—the carpet wall; and above all, Carlton's irreverent
sniggering in meeting. But then, most who had met
us at Susan Ashford's wedding said “we warnt so stuck
up as folks said; and that mammy Ashford herself thought
it was not a bit proud to have a carpet wall, or the like,
and that Mr. Carltin was a right down clever feller, powerful
funny, and naterally addicted to laffin.” And to crown
all, Mr. Ashford himself, and belonging to poor Philip's
sect, publicly avowed that “he hisself had actially laff'd in
meetin—for the water came so sudden like—only he kept
his face kivered with his hat, and nobody hadn't seen
him.”

The enemy then affirmed that Glenville himself had
laughed: but he procured certificates from every body at
church to this point that “nobody had seen or heard John
Glenville laughing; and these were read wherever Jerry's
party had made the charge.[2] For any silly charge, if uncontradicted
out there, and maybe in here—defeats an election:
either because the charge is deemed an offset against
the candidate, or people like to see their candidate in earnest,
and his rebutting allegations looks like zeal for their

interest, and shows a due sense in his mind of popular
favour. Beside, if one neglect a trifling charge, his enemies
will soon bring larger and more plausible ones—
whereas his alertness scares them.

At last it was boldly alleged that “John would have
laughed if he had not expected to be a candidate!” But to
this it was triumphantly replied that “Jerry would have
laughed if he had been at meetin”—for Squire Chippy and
Col. Skelpum gave two separate certificates, that “Jerry
Simpson had laughed when he heard tell of it!!” Hence
poor Philip's sermon was celebrated over all our district;
and everywhere was spoken and even spouted the sentence
“no one couldn't make airth,” and so through all
the four old-fashioned chemical elements: till all men were
ashamed to bring even against “poor Carltin” a charge,
to which all plainly showed, if they had been at meeting,
they would have been equally liable themselves. And so
our party triumphed over what once seriously threatened
to defeat us.

The price of liberty, eternal vigilance, is well paid in a
New Purchase. With us it was watched by all classes,
and throughout the year: it was indeed the universal business.
Our offices all, from Governor down to a deputy
constable's deputy and fence-viewer's clerk's first assistant,
were in the direct gift of the people. We even elected magistrates,
clerks of court, and the judges presiding and associate!
And some who knew better, yet for rabblerousing
purposes, gravely contended that trustees of colleges,
and all presidents, professors, and teachers should be
elected directly by the people!

Our social state, therefore, was for ever in ferment; for
ever was some election, doing, being done, done or going to
be done; and each was as bitterly contested as that of president
or governor. In all directions candidates were perpetually
scouring the country with hats, saddle-bags, and

pockets crammed with certificates, defending and accusing,
defaming and clearing up, making licentious speeches,
treating to corn whiskey, violating the Sabbath, and cursing
the existing administration or the administration's wife
and wife's father! And every body expected at some
time to be a candidate for something; or that his uncle
would be; or his cousin, or his cousin's wife's cousin's
friend would be: so that every body, and every body's
relations, and every body's relations' friends, were for ever
electioneering, till the state of nasty, pitiful intrigues and
licentious slanders and fierce hostility, was like a rotten
carcass where maggots are, each for himself and against
his neighbour, wriggling and worming about!

Men were turned into mutual spies, and watched and
treasured and reported and commented upon, looks, words
and actions, even the most trifling and innocent! And we
were divided, house against house! and man against man;
and settlements, politically considered, were clannish and
filled with animosity. The sovereign people was, indeed,
feared by the candidate who truckled to-day, and most
heartily despised when he ruled to-morrow.

The very boys verging on manhood were aware of their
future political importance; and even several years before
voting, they were feared, petted, courted and cajoled, becoming
of course conceited, unmannerly and disrespectful. Their
morals were consequently often sadly hurt; and boys then
voted fraudulently. Standing either over the No. 21 pasted
in the shoe or between No. 21 in the hat, and No 22 in
the shoe, they would sometimes deliberately swear, when
challenged as to age that they were over 21, or between 21
and 22!! Such depraved lads, destitute of reverence, will
talk loud and long and confidently, in any company contradicting
and even rebuking their betters—and all the time a
rabblerouser[3] affects to listen and admire such firmness

and independence of spirit!! Get out! you scornful puppy!
and do not prate to me about religious cant; can any thing
come up to the cant and whine of a selfish, godless rabblerouser?
And dare such a one say that evangelical missionaries
are not safer guides, and better friends to the
people than—He? Out with you, atheist.

We had of course in the Purchase a passion for stump-speeching.
But recollect, we often mount the stump only
figuratively: and very good stump-speeches are delivered
from a table, a chair, a whiskey barrel, and the like. Sometimes
we make our best stump speeches on horse-back. In
this case, when the horse is excited by our eloquence, or
more commonly by mischievous boys, more action goes
with the speech than even Demosthenes inculcated—often
it becomes altogether circumambulatory.

Once a candidate stood near the tail of Isam Greenbriar's
ox cart at Woodville, when some of his opponents,—(perhaps
some of his own friends, for the joke was tempting)—
noiselessly drew out the forward pins, when at the most
unexpected instant, ay, in the very climax of his most
ferocious effervescence, Mr. Rhodomontade was canted
into the dirt!

Again, our candidate for fence-viewer, with some half
dozen friends, was once hard at work with certificates and
speeches in Sam Dreadnought's wagon; when Sam, having
several miles to drive before dark, and having already
waited two good hours for matters to end, suddenly leaped
on his saddle horse, and then, at a word and a crack,
away dashed the team loaded with politics, very much to
the amusement of the people, but much to the discomfiture
of our candidate.

Nothing surpasses the munificent promises and at the
same time the external and grovelling humility of a genuine
rabblerouser, just before an election. He shakes hands
with every body, friend and foe; he has agents to treat at

his expense at every doggery;[4] and in his own person he
deals out whiskey and gingerbread, as we have seen, to a
long line of independent voters marching past him with
drum and fife to the polls; and he drinks out of any
drunken vagabond's bottle, laughing at his beastly jokes,
putting his arm round his filthy neck, and allows himself
thus to be slobbered upon, while patting the brute on the
back and being patted in turn!

Yet have we noble gentlemen who, when candidates,
are courteous indeed, but who will not do base things, nor
make absurd and wicked promises, and who when defeated
back out with manly scorn of licentious opponents. One
such high minded individual in order to show the folly of
great promises, came out the year after a defeat, saying he
had altered his purposes, and now was a candidate again,
and would if elected exert his utmost efforts to force the legislature
“to abolish the fever and ague, and to pass a bill
to find a gold mine on every poor man's quarter section.”
I forgot whether he was now elected; but he deserved
to be.

Glenville, though full of tact, was independent; although
we did give credit for kip and neats-leather, even where it
was doubtful whether our political friends would pay, and
bought raw hides at higher prices than were paid at Spiceburgh
and Woodville. And Glenville did submit to, or rather
he could not prevent a party with him in a canoe from upsetting
the boat in the middle of Shining River; and who
thus gave the candidate what they called a—“political baptising:”
but whilst this was no dry joke, our friend still, on
swimming to land with the others, joined in the laugh.
This too was a fair type of his immersion into the troubled
waters of political life; and the way he endured the ducking

so established his reputation above Jerry's, that at the
ensuing election a few weeks after, Mr. G. was successful
by a clean majority of 171 votes!

Politicians, even in here, I am informed, are also very
frequently immersed and into puddles; from which they
rarely ever do flounder out, and when they do, it is said,
they look nasty and soiled, and have dirty ways, all the rest
of their lives! But maybe the less said on this point the
sooner mended; and therefore, as Mr. Glenville is now
the people's man, the world expects his history, and we
proceed to treat of the same in three chapters.

23. CHAPTER XXIII.

Mr. Glenville was about my age, or rather I was about
his age; or to be as definite as a down east school book, we
were both about the same age, and were born in A. D. 179—;
—and hence have already lived part of two centuries,
being as old as the current century added to the fraction of
the other.

He was born, and educated for some years, in Philadelphia.
His principal teacher was Mr. Moulder, who superintended
an old-fashioned orthodox quaker school; in
which morals were far better and more successfully cultivated
than in modern quackery schools, where morals is
made a separate matter. And in this primitive school John
imbibed much of the Yea and Nay in his character, or his
right-up-and-downedness; a compound conducing greatly
to his safety and happiness in the strifes, dangers and perplexities
of the wilderness. He had been destined to the

counting house, but the removal of his friends to the west,
changed his destiny; and hence, being a good elementary
mathematician and well acquainted with theoretical surveying,
he was invited by Gen. Duff Green, then of Kentucky,
to accompany a party to the Upper Missouri as assistant
surveyor; which invitation was accepted.

This suited our hero's love of adventure and gave an opportunity
of seeing—the world. Not the world as seen by
a trip to Paris or London, but the world natural and proper;
the world in its native convexity, its own ravines and mountains,
its virgin soil, its primitive wilds, its unworn prairies!
To float in birch-bark canoes on the swelling bosom of
free waters!—waters never degraded with bearing loads of
merchandise, or prostituted in a part diverted to turn mills,
or fill canals, or in any way to be a slave, and then to be let
go discoloured with coal, or saw dust, or flour, or dyestuffs,
marks of bondage—that they may hurry away, sullen and
indignant to hide their dishonoured waves in the ocean!

He went to see the world as the Omnipotent made it and
the deluge left it! He went to hear the thunder-tramp of
the wild congregations—the horse and the buffalo,—shaking
the prairie-plains that heaved up proud to bear on their
free heart the untamed, free, bounding, glorious herds! He
went to look at the sun rising and setting on opposite sides
of one and the same field; and where the rain-bow spans
half a continent and curves round the terrestrial semicircle!
He went to see the smoke of a wigwam! where death flies
on the wing of a stone headed arrow, and the Indian is in
the drapery of untouched forests and midst the fragrance of
the ungardened, many coloured, ever-varied flowers!

What change from the smokes and smells of a city!—the
outcry, war, confusion of its anxious, crowded, jostled, envious,
jealous, rivalous population!—its contrasts of moneyed
consequence and povertysmitten dependence!—its rolling
vehicles of travelling ennui, and hobbling crutch of rheumatic

beggary!—and its saloons of boisterous mirth adjoining the
sad enclosure of silent tombstones! Oh! the change
from dark, damp, stifling pent holes of alleys and courts,
where filth exhales its stench without the sun!—to walk
abroad, run, leap, ride, hunt and shout, amid the unwrought,
unsubdued, boundless world of primitive forest, flood, and
prairie!

After a few weeks, Glenville was detached from the
General's party, and sent with the principal surveyor and
one hunter to complete a survey, with directions to rejoin
the main body some two hundred miles down the Missouri,
after the accomplishment of the work. The trio, therefore,
proceeded to the scene of their labour, which was more
than fifty miles beyond the white settlements, and bordering
on the hunting grounds of the Indians.

One morning, when preparing breakfast on the bank of a
river tributary to the Missouri, a large party of Indians appeared
on the opposite bank, who, on espying our surveyors,
came over to visit their camp, warriors and warriors'
squaws, all wading with red and bare legs; and then,
pleased with their reception and some small presents, they
insisted that our friends should now go and take breakfast
on the other side; a request that could not be declined
without engendering distrust. Accordingly, our trio mounted
their horses and followed their wading friends across the
river.

Happy that the appetite is often strong! and yet strong
as it was, it was almost too weak for the occasion. The
breakfast began with a drink of whiskey and complimentary
smoking, after which came the principal viand, to wit:
a soup, or hash, or swill, made of river water and deer-meat
and deer-entrails all poured from a large iron kettle
and smoking hot into—“an earthen dish?” No. “A calabash?”
No: but into a sugar trough!—a wooden trough!!
and about as large as piggy uses in his early days, when

fattening for a roast. Had the thing been as clean, our
surveyors would never have flinched; but the trough was
coated with oleaginous matter both within and without;
and a portion of the interior coat, now melted by the absorption
of free caloric, was contributing a yellow oily
richness and flavour to the savoury mess! And on the
crust more remote from heat frolicked larvae[5] with nice
white bodies and uncouth dark heads, careless of comrades
floating lifeless in the boiling gulf below! Had Uncle
Tommy been now narrating, he would have improved the
occasion to animadvert on the beastliness of a drunken
riot, where some are torpid under the table, and others
flourishing glasses above it; nay, he would have gone on
to insist that grubs and such like are to be found even in
the most fashionable places: but we content ourselves
with furnishing the text.

From this aboriginal mess both red and white men fished
up pieces of venison, with sharp sticks, and with tin cups
and greasy gourds they ladled out broth till all was exhausted,
except some lifeless things in a little puddle of liquid
matter at the bottom, and a portion of entrail lodged on
the side of the trough. Our folks, who had, indeed, seen
“a thing or two” in cabin cookery, were nearly sickened
now; for spite of clenching the teeth in sucking broth,
they were confident more than once, that articles designed
to be excluded, had wormed through the enclosure. It required
a pint of whiskey extra during the day, quids innumerable,
and countless cigars to do away the odor and the
taste: and Glenville used to say the memory of that Indian
breakfast would serve him for ever! And yet why not apply
de gustibus non, to this breakfast? The classic Romans
delighted in snails; the sacred Jews in grasshoppers. The
Celestials eat rats and dogs, and the elastic Parisians devour

frogs, and sometimes cats. And may not American
Indians eat, without disparagement, entrails, brown and
yellow grease, and fly-blows? Depend on it, reader, this
eating, is, after all, a mere matter of taste.

Not many days after this breakfast, our people met in a
prairie a party of Osages, and mostly mounted on small,
but very active horses. The chief ordered his troop to
halt, and all dismounting, he made signs for the whites to
advance; upon which he stepped up to Glenville—the
Mercury of the three, and began an unintelligible gabble of
English and Osage. At length he felt about Glenville's
person, with his hands, and even into his bosom and pockets,
till our friends became a little alarmed: when Glenville,
remembering what he had heard, that nothing so quickly
disarms and even makes a friend of a hostile Indian, as the
show of courage, began to look angry, uttered words of indignation
and even jerked away the chiefs hand. Upon
this the warrior stepping back, laughed long and loud, and
with manifest contempt looked at the dwarf dimensions of
the white but with approbation at his spunk; both natural
feelings, when he beheld a little white man, five feet
seven, and weighing nearly nearly 120lbs avoirdupois, boldly
resisting and repelling a big red one, more than six feet
three, and weighing about 235lbs! In a few moments, however,
the Indian again advanced, but with the greatest
good-nature; and while he now patted Glenville with one
hand on the back, with the other he felt in our hero's side
pocket, whence he soon abstracted a small knife and immediately
transferred the same to his own pouch. After that,
going to his pony, he returned with a magnificent buffalo
robe wrought with rude outlines of beasts and Indians;
which, throwing down before Glenville as a fair exchange
of presents, he once more went to his horse, and then leaping
on the animal's back, the chieftain gave the sign, and

away the free spirits of the brave were again galloping to
wards the hazy line of the horizon!

The robe, during my sojourn in Glenville, was in the
winter the outer cover of our bed. And to that was owing,
one of my curious dreams:—a vast buffalo bull stripped of
his skin and charging with his horns upon a gigantic Indian
in an open prairie, while the Indian kept the bull at
bay with a sugar trough in one hand, and a great dirk knife
in the other. Indeed, if, when in a young gentleman's debating
society at the discussion of the original and novel
question, whether the savage life be preferable to the civilized,
if then, I am irresistibly impelled to vote in the affirmative,
it is owing to my constitutional tendencies, having
been strengthened by sleeping two entire winters under
that buffalo robe. Only think! reader,—to sleep two
winters, in a log cabin, in a bran New Purchase, near a
chieftain and a warrior's grave enclosed with logs and
marked by a stake painted red; and under the hairy hide of
an enormous prairie bull!—a bull killed by a gigantic Osage
chief!—a hide dressed by his squaw, the queen, or his papooses,
the princesses! a robe bestowed as a king's reward
for my brother-in-law's courage!! Take care. I
feel the effect even now—hurra—waw-aw for the savage life.
It is carried in the affirmative by acclamation—let me go.
I must go, and at least draw a bead on something with my
rifle! flash! bang!

The surveyor's party, having in a few weeks finished
their work, commenced descending the Missouri in a canoe,
intending to reach the place where they had left their horses;
after which they would proceed by land to the rendezvous.

One night as they were borne down rapidly by a very
strong current, after having by the dim starlight barely escaped
many real snags, planters, drifts and the like, and
after having imagined in the obscurity a hundred others,
they were at length driving towards a dark mass; but

whether real or not could at first be only conjectured. Alas!
it was no fancy; but before the direction of the canoe could
be altered, it was driven violently against a drift-island, and
upsetting, was carried directly under it, and so effectually
hid or destroyed as never to be seen again. One man at the
instant of collision, leaped upon the island: the others
were thrown into the water; but they succeeded, although
torn and bruised in the attempt, and with much difficulty, in
gaining the floating mass and getting on it. All their property,
provisions, clothes, surveying instruments, guns, &c.
were lost, except the rifle which the hunter alway kept in
his hand, the clothes on their persons, and the notes and
records of the surveys which Mr. Glenville had accidentally
put early that evening into his hat and pockets!

This, reader, was what is termed out there—“a nasty
fix;” and yet our friends were still moving, not indeed very
fast, for extemporaneous islands move at all times sullenly,
and often come to an anchor suddenly, and there remain for
a week, a year, and sometimes they never float again. Still,
it deserves to be called—a fix; for first they were fixed absolutely
on the drift, and relatively as to the banks; again,
it was now late in the fall, and a very cold night was fixing
their clothes into ice or ice upon them; and lastly, they
were fixed by their sudden unfix from the canoe, and by being
hungry, wet, and cold, and yet destitute of all affixes,
suffixes and—“fixins.” And so this curious fixation of our
heroes may aid Webster in his subsequent attempts to fix
the American-English by unfixing the English-English.

The comrades now made a survey of their territory, and
found they owned an island of logs, tree-tops and brush,
matted and laced every way, with an alluvion of earth, sand
and weeds; the whole running, at present, due north and
south, one hundred yards, with easting and westing of
nearly fifty yards. No sign of human habitation was visible
nor trace of living animal; and it soon became morally

certain the island was desert: and hence our friends began
to devise means of abandoning the involuntary ownership.
But the sole means appeared to be by swimming: and in that
was great hazard, yet it must be done, unless they should
wait for accidental deliverance; or till the party below disappointed
at their non-arrival, should ascend the river to
search for them. After a gloomy council it was unanimously
decided to swim away from their island.

The hunter immediately and voluntarily offered to adventure
the first, promising, on reaching the shore, to stand
at the best landing point, and there shout at intervals as a
guide to the others. Contrary to all entreaties and dehortations,
he was resolved to swim with his rifle—that weapon
being, in fact, always in his hands like an integral part of
his body. His only reply was—“She's—(rifles in natural
grammar are she's; to a true woodsman a rifle is like a beloved
sister; and he no more thinks of he-ing and him-ing,
or even it-ing the one than the other)—“she's bin too long
in the family, boys, to be desarted without no attempt to
save her; no, no, it's not the fust time she's been swimm'd
over a river; uncle Bill, arter that bloody fight with the
Injins, jumped down the cliff with her and swimm'd her
clean over the Ohio in his hand, and I kin outrassel and
outswim uncle Bill any day—no no—we sink or swim together:
so good bye, boys, here goes, I'll holler as soon as
I git foothold.” The splashing of the water drowned the
rest; and away with his heavy rifle in one hand, and striking
out with the other, swam the bold hunter, till borne down
by the fierce current he had soon passed out of sight and
hearing.

With intense anxiety the remaining two waited for their
comrade's promised shout; but no noise came save the
rushing of the boiling and angry water past and under the
drift-wood. Twenty long minutes had elapsed, and yet no
voice—ten more—and all silence, except the waters!

Could it be, as they had all along dreaded, that the hunter
was indeed sunk with his favourite gun!—or had he been
carried one or more miles down before he could land? The
force of the current rendered this probable; and, therefore,
they would wait an hour, to give him time to walk up the
bank opposite the island and shout. But when that long
and dreadful hour had elapsed, and no voice of the living
comrade yet came across the dark and tumultuous waves,
the agony of the hunter's only brother (for such was the
surveyor on the drift with Glenville,)—became irrepressible,
and he said, “I must see what's become of poor Isaac—I
can't stand it any longer, here's my hand, Glenville, my
poor boy—farewell!—if I reach the shore I'll holler, if not,
why we must all die—farewell.” The next instant the
surveyor was borne away; and the noise of his swimming
becoming fainter and fainter was soon imperceptible, and
John Glenville stood alone!

Reader, my brother-in-law was then, compared with
men, only a boy; and yet he stood there alone and without
fear! And was there nothing of the morally sublime
in that?—a very young man thus alone in the middle of the
Missouri, on a dark and cold night; beyond the outskirts of
civilized life; far enough away from his mother's home,
and affectionate sisters; and listening for the shouts of
that second swimmer—and without fear? Could any body
old or young be in such circumstances, and not be alarmed?
Where was that noble hunter? was he drowned? Would
the second swimmer reach the shore? And if hardy and
strong woodsmen escaped not, could he, a boy, expect to
reach the shore? True, thoughts of his mother now rushed
in uncalled; but these only nerved his purpose, and he
resolved, with God's aid, to use his art and skill for their
sakes; or, if he must perish in the tumultuating flood of
the wilderness, to die putting forth his best exertions to live
—hark! what comes like a dying echo?—can it be!—yes,

hark! it comes again, the voice of the second swimmer—
there it is again! Thank God—one is safe, but where is
the other?

Thus encouraged, Glenville prepared for his conflct with
the waves. He was an expert swimmer, and often in early
boyhood had swum from Philadelphia to the opposite island
in the Delaware. Could he, therefore, now preserve his
self-possession, why might he not accomplish a less distance
in the Missouri; for the shore he knew could not be
more than a quarter of a mile from the drift. Accordingly
he divested himself of all clothes, except shirt and pantaloons,
made up the garments taken off into a small bundle,
in the midst of which, securing the papers of the survey,
he fastened it together with his hat between his shoulders:
and then, wading out to the end of a projecting tree, he
earnestly implored God for help, and cast himself boldly into
the turbid waters of the dark and eddying flood. And
never did he seem to float more buoyant or swim with greater
ease, without any perturbation permitting the river to
bear him downward on its bosom: and yet directing his
efforts as much as possible, towards the point whence at
intervals was borne to his ears the shouting of his comrade;
till, in some fifteen minutes he landed unhurt and not greatly
wearied about one hundred yards below the voice, whither
he instantly hastened, and to his heartfelt joy, was soon
shaking hands not only with the surveyor, but also with the
hunter. Yes! poor fellow—he had found his favourite too
heavy, and one arm, powerful as it was, too weak for his
long battle with a king of floods. Long, long, very long
had he held to his gun; but half-suffocated, his strength
failing, and he whirling away at times from the shore almost
reached, to safe his life he had at last slowly relaxed
his grasp, and his rifle sank. Yet even then repenting,
he had twice gone down to the bottom to recover the
weapon: and happily, failed in finding it—his strength

never would have sufficed incumbered again with a gun to
reach the land.

Indeed, when he gained the bank he was barely able to
clamber up, and could scarcely speak or even walk, when
discovered by his brother: who had easily reached the
shore himself, and, after shouting once or twice to Glenville,
had gone down on the bank a full quarter of a mile
before finding the hunter. By the aid of the surveyor, the
hunter then had walked up till they had reached the spot
where they were both now met by Glenville; and thus by
the goodness of Providence, our three friends were delivered
from their peril.

Upon reconnoitering, it was conjectured that they must
be near the squatter's hut, with whom had been left their
horses; and hence taking a course, partly by accident and
partly by observation, not long after they were cheered by
the distant bark of his dogs, and next by the gleam of fire
through the chinks of his cabin. Here, of course, the party
was welcomed, and supplied with whatever was in the
squatter's power to afford for their refreshment; principally,
however, a hearty dram of whiskey, some corn bread and
jerked venison, but above all, a bed of dry skins, and a
heap of blazing logs.

In the morning they obtained supplies of skins and blankets,
agreeing to pay their host if he would go with them to
the rendezvous; which he did, and was suitably and cordially
rewarded. It was now perceived that if the poor
hunter had left his rifle on the drift-island, she could have
been regained by means of a raft: but to tell where she had
been abandoned in the river was impossible. Otherwise
our hunter would have made many a dive for the rescue
of his “deer slayer;” as it was, he came away disconsolate,
and, indeed, as from the grave of a comrade—almost
in tears!

24. CHAPTER XXIV.

Our party reached the rendezvous only a few hours beyond
the appointed time. Here, as a bee-tree had been
just reported, it was unanimously determined to commemorate
the deliverance and safe arrival of our three friends by
a special jollification. In other words, it was voted to obtain
the wild honey; and then, in a compound of honey,
water and whiskey, to toast our undrowned heroes and their
presence of mind and bravery:—no small honour, if the
trouble of getting the honey is considered. For, on following
the aerial trail of the bees, the hive was ascertained to
be in a hollow limb of the largest patriarchal sire of the
forest—a tree more than thirty feet in circumference! and
requiring six men at least, touching each other's hands,
to encircle the trunk!

And this is a fair chance to say a word about the enormous
circumambitudialitariness (!) of many western trees.
It is common to find such from six to seven feet in diameter;
and we have more than once sat on stumps and measured
across three lengths of my cane, nearly ten feet; and
found, on counting the concentric circles, that these monsters
must have been from seven to eight hundred years
old—an age greater than Noah's, and almost as venerable
as that of Methusaleh! Shall we feel no sublimity in walking

amid and around such ancients?—trees that have tossed
their branches in the sun light and winds of eight centuries!
—that have scorned the tempests and tornadoes, whose fury
ages ago prostrated cities and engulfed navies!—that have
sheltered wildfowl in their leaves, and hid wild beasts in
their caverns from the dooms-day looking gloom of many
total solar eclipses! and have gleamed in the disastrous
light of comets returning in the rounds of centennary cycles!

Such trees, but for the insidious and graceless axe, that
in its powerlessness begged a small handle of the generous
woods, such would yet stand for other centuries to come, at
least decaying, if not growing: they are herculean even in
weakness and dying! And dare finical European tourists
say we have no antiquity? Poor souls!—poor souls!—our
trees were fit for navies, long years before their old things
existed! Ay, when their oldest castles and cities were
unwrought rock and unburnt clay! Our trees belong to the
era of Egyptian architecture—they are coeval with the pyramids!

Near the junction of the White River of Indiana and the
Wabash, stands a sycamore fully ninety feet in circumference!
Within its hollow can be stabled a dozen horses;
and if a person stand in the centre of the ground circle, and
hold in his hand the middle of a pole fifteen feet long, he
may twirl that pole as he pleases, and yet touch no part of
the inner tree! He may, as did Bishop Hilsbury, mounted
on a horse, ride in at a natural opening, canter round the
area, and trot forth to the world again! But to the bee-tree.

It is a proverb, “He that would eat the fruit must first
climb the tree and get it:” but when that fruit is honey,
he that wants it must first cut the tree down. And that was
the present necessity. No sooner was this resolved, however,
than preparation was made for execution; and instantly

six sturdy fellows stood with axes, ready for the work of
destruction. They were all divested of garments excepting
shirts and trowsers; and now, with arms bared to the
shoulders, they took distances around the stupendous tree.
Then the leader of the band, glancing an eye to see if his
neighbour was ready, stepped lightly forward with one leg,
and swinging his weapon, a la Tom Robison, he struck;
and the startled echoes from the “tall timber” of the dark
dens, were telling each other that the centuries of a wood-monarch
were numbered! That blow was the signal for
the next axe, and its stroke for the next; till cut after cut
brought it to the leader's second blow: and thus was completed
the circle of rude harmony; while the lonely cliffs of
the farther shores, and the grim forests on this, were repeating
to one another the endless and regular notes of the six
death-dealing axes! And never before had the music of
six axes so rung out to enliven the grand solitudes!—and a
smaller number was not worthy to bid such a tree fall!

Long was it, however, before the tree gave even the
slightest symptom of alarm. What had it cared for the
notchings of a hundred blows! Yet chip after chip had
leaped from the wounded body—each a block of solid wood
—and the keen iron teeth were beginning to gnaw upon the
vitals! Alas! oh! noble tree, you tremble! Ah! it is not
the deep and accustomed thunder of the heavens, that shakes
you now!—no mighty quaking of the earth! That is a
strange shivering—it is the chill shivering of death! But
what does death mean where existence was deemed immortal!
Why are those topmost branches, away off towards
the blue heavens, so agitated! Tree!—tree!—no wind
stirs them so—they incline towards the earth—away! hunters,
away! away! Hark!—the mighty heart is breaking!
And now onward and downward rushes you broad expanse
of top, with the cataract roar of eddying whirlwinds; and
the far-reaching arms have caught the strong and stately

trees; and all are hurrying and leaping and whirling to the
earth, in tempest and fury! Their fall is heard not! In
the overwhelming thunder of that quivering trunk, and the
thousand crushings of those giant limbs, and the deep groan
of the earth, are lost all other noises, as the slight crack of
our rifles amid the sudden bursting of the electric cloud!
There lies the growth of ages! Once more the sun pours
the tide of all his rays over an acre of virgin soil, barely
discerned by him for centuries!

Well might Glenville feel rewarded and honoured, when
for his sake such a tree lay prostrate at his feet! And yet
in all this was fulfilled the saying,—the sublime and ridiculous
are separated by narrow limits; for, could any thing
be grander than such a tree and such an overthrow? Could
any be meaner than the purpose for which it fell?—viz:—
To get a gallon of honey to sweeten a keg of whiskey!

25. CHAPTER XXV.

After many other trials and adventures Glenville returned
safe to his home in Kentucky. Here with his wages
he loaded a boat with “produce,” and set float for New
Orleans; intending with the cash realized by the trip, on
his return, to go into Illinois with a stock of goods and
“keep store.” But at Orleans he was seized with the
yellow fever, and was finally given over by his physician,
and orders issued, in anticipation of death, for his interment.
That very night, however, in delirium, and while
his kind yet weary nurse slumbered in a chair, he arose
and finding a basin of water brought to wash him in the

morning, he instantly seized and swallowed the whole
contents—the only thing deemed wanting to kill him!
And yet when put again into bed, he fell into a calm and
delicious slumber; perspired freely; and when he awoke
the fever was gone, and my friend saved. Let careful persons,
therefore, who keep a memorandum book put this
along side the celebrated Scotch-herring-recipe,—“Cure for
Orleans fever: two quarts of cold water, and cover up in
bed.”

Glenville did, indeed, get home and with some money
from a successful sale; but he was worn and emaciated,
and many months passed before he could cross the Ohio
and set up his store. His cup of bitterness was not drained;
and evil came now in a form demanding stout heart
and steady nerves. Ay! our dark and illimitable forests
then hid men of lion hearts, of iron nerves, of sure and
deadly weapons! Perhaps such dwell there yet; if so,
wo! to the enemy that rashly arouses them from their
lairs and challenges, where civilized discipline avails not!
and where battle is a thousand conflicts man to man, rifle
to rifle, knife to knife, hatchet to hatchet! And Glenville,
boy as he was, proved himself worthy a name among the
lion-hearted!

We stood once on a solemn spot in the wilderness and
leaned against the very tree where the bloody knife of the
only survivor had rudely and briefly carved the tale of the
tragedy. It stoodn early thus:

“18 injins—15 wites—injins all kill'd and buried here—
14 wites kill'd and buried too—P. T.”

Laugh away, men of pomatum and essence, at Hoosiers,
and Corncrackers, and Buckeyes: ay! lace-coats, mow them
down in an open plain with cannister and grape, you safely
encased behind bulwarks; or cut them to pieces with
pigeon breasted, mailed and helmed cuirassiers,—but seek
them not as enemies in their native and adopted woods!
The place of your graves will be notched in their trees, and

you will never lie under polished marble, in a fashionable
and decorated cemetery!

But Glenville, in store keeping witnessed a farce before
his tragedy. Among his earthen and sham-Liverpool, were
found some articles, similar to things domesticated in great
houses, and which, although not made unto honour, were in
the present case very unexpectedly elevated in the domestic
economy. These modesties occupied a retired and rather
dusky part of the store; when one day an honest female
Illinois—(i. e. a Sucker's wife)—in her travels around the
room in search of crocks suddenly exclaimed: “Well! I
never! if them yonder with the handles on, aint the nicest
I ever seen!—Johnny, what's the price?—but I must have
three any how;—here Johnny do up this white one—(rapping
it with her knuckles)—and them two brown ones up
thare.”

A large purchase, to be sure, of the article; but curiosity
asked no questions: and in due time the trio were packed
and hanging in a meal bag from the horn of the lady's saddle;
who, on taking leave, thus addressed our marvelling
shop keeper:—

“Mr. Glenville, next time you go gallin, jist gimme and
my ole-man a call,—we've got a right down smart chance
of a gall to look at—good bye.”

Our hero, who had early discovered, that store keeping is
none the worse when the owner is in favour with the softer
sex, did not forget this invitation, and in due season made his
kind friends a visit: and when supper was placed on the
table by the smiling maid and her considerate mother, what
do you think was there?

“Corn bread?”

Hold your ear this way—(a whisper.)

“No!—he! he! he!”—

Yes, indeed, and doubledeed!—the white one full of
milk!! And after that you know our humblest democrat,
may well look up to the presidency.

It had become about this time necessary for Mr. G. to
visit Louisville. For that purpose, he left his store in
charge of a young man; the latter promising among other
things to sleep in the store, instead of which, however, he
always slept at a neighbouring cabin. Hence what was
feared happened,—the store was robbed. Not truly in the
eastern style, of small change in the desk, some half dozen
portable packages, or paltry three dozen yards of something;—no,
no, the robbery was on the wholesale principle
commensurate with the vastness of our woods and prairies.
The entire stock in trade was carried off—bales,
boxes, bags, packages, and even yard-sticks and scales to
sell by—yes! and hardware, and software, and brittleware,
—ay! crocks with and without handles, and whatever may
have been their standing in society,—all, all—were taken!
so that when the clerk came in the morning to retail to the
Suckers, there was indeed, a beggarly account—not of
empty boxes, these being mostly carried away—but of
empty shelves, and empty desks, and empty store. His
occupation was even more completely gone then Othello's.

On the river bank[6] were, indeed, traces enough of a
mysterious departure of merchandise; but whether the
embarkation had been in skows, or “perogues,” and other
troughlike vessels, was uncertain. Nor could it even be
conjectured, for what port the store had been spirited away;
or for what secret cove or recess of tall weeds matted into
texture with sharp briars and thorny bushes!

Previous to Glenville's return, a fellow that had been
noticed lurking in the woods near the store for two days
before the robbery, was recognised in a small village, the
day after, and in suspicious circumstances. He was,
therefore apprehended; when, after a short imprisonment,
he confessed having been employed by some strangers to

steer a flat boat loaded with something or other from Glenville's
landing. On his return, our merchant went to the
sheriff, who indignant at a villainy that had so completely
ruined a very young man after years of toil and danger
passed in acquiring his little property, did himself suggest
and offer voluntarily to aid in a scheme to compel the prisoner
to disclose, at least, where the goods were concealed,
and before they should be removed from the country or
ruined by the damp.

We are not advocates for Lynching, but we do know
that where laws cannot and do not protect backwoodsmen,
they fall back on reserved rights and protect themselves.
Nay, such, instead of laying aside defensive weapons,
after legislators shall have been wheedled, or frightened, or
bribed into vile plans by puling or fanatical moralists to
nurse the wilful and godless murderer on good bread,
wholesome water and occasional soups, all the remainder
of his forfeited days—we know that such woodmen will
go better armed, to slay and not unrighteously on the spot
every unholy apostate that maliciously and wilfully strikes
down and stamps on God's image! And when the day
comes that the avenger of a brother's blood wakes in our
land—let no canting infidel or universalist blame those that
now resist the abrogation of divine laws!—but let him
blame hypocritical juries, rabblerousing governors, and
all that are now deserting the weak, the innocent, the unwary,
the defenceless, and crying “God pity and defend
and save and bless—the murderer!”[7] and “Shame on
the dead—poor lifeless victim!”

The sheriff and Glenville with two fearless and voluntary
associates prevailed on the jailor to loan them the prisoner
for a day or two, making known their scheme and giving
suitable pledges for his redelivery. The loan was
made, and then, on reaching a fit place, the prisoner was
dismounted, and Glenville proposed to him the following:

“My friend, we know very well you helped to rob my
store, and that you know well enough where your comrades
are and how the goods can be recovered; now, if
you will tell, not only will we get you out of jail, provided
you will leave the country, but I will give you also ten
dollars; but if you won't tell, why then we'll flog you into
it—come, what do you say?”

“Well, he be some-thing'd if he know'd; and if he did,
he wasn't going to be lick'd into tellin—and he'd sue them
for salt and battery.”

Peril, indeed, was in this illegal process; but the party
had good reasons for believing the fellow a desperate robber,
and so they seemed to be preparing for a severe flaggellation,
when he supposing all was solemn earnest,
said he was ready to confess, and, provided Mr. G. would
forgive and not prosecute, he would conduct the present
party to the plunder, or a part of it. The promise was readily
given and the fellow was unbound and remounted without
any trammel, but with this comfortable assurance, that
if he tried to escape or to betray them into any rendezvous
of robbers, he should be instantly shot down, and that whether
they died themselves for it or not.[8]

Accordingly, away all started through the woods, where
the prisoner yet rode, confident, as if following a blaze, and
stopping only at intervals to look at the sun, or the moss,
or to examine a tree or branch, and shewing if he had one

hundred yards fair start, it would be no easy matter
either to catch or shoot him. At last, a wild turkey was
seen trotting across their course, fully eighty yards off, and
then Glenville, nearly as good a shot as the writer, merely
stopping his horse, levelled and fired from his saddle, when
to his own surprise, as well as that of the others, the bird
fell dead in his tracks! After this the guide would check
his own horse, if he voluntarily stepped faster than the
others, lest he should seem meditating an escape; for if a
moving turkey could be shot, so he seemed to think could
more easily be, a moving man.

The fellow, however, led at length into a deep ravine on
Big Wolf Creek; and there, sure enough, some in a cave
and some in a hollow tree were portions of the merchandise
—it being evident also that within a very few hours a still
larger portion had been removed to some other depot! By
the force of additional threats, promises and entreaties, the
rascal named the other robbers, he being merely a subordinate;
but as no small hazard would be encountered in
attacking the temporary cabin, where the principal robber
and the remaining goods were, it was determined first to
get additional volunteers and make more suitable preparation.
Packing the damaged and soiled goods on their
horses, the sheriff's party returned with their prisoner to
the village of Shanteburg, and redelivered him to the jailor,
intending if his information proved substantially correct to
have the fellow not only liberated, but otherwise rewarded.

Here, also, two others volunteered to join in the robber
hunt; upon which all, with loaded rifles, and knives and
hatchets in their belts, soon mounted, and were plunging
again into the darkness of the forest, now black from a
moonless night. Early on the next morning they came in
sight of the cabin. When within fifty yards, the robber
stepping to the door let his rifle fall in that peculiar manner
that belongs to a practiced marksman, at the same time

warning off his visitors, and solemnly swearing he would
kill the man that first approached his barricade. At the
instant, however, of the man's appearance and even before
he had faily uttered a word, our friends had “treed” in a
twinkling, and now stood with pointed weapons and keen
eyes towards the bold thief. Glenville, on leaping from
his horse, instead of treeing, stood boldly out and thus exclaimed
loud enough to be heard by all: “Sheriff, you are
all running this risk for me—'tis my duty to lead. I'll
attack the scoundrel; if he shoots me—avenge my death!”
With that he fearlessly advanced with his levelled rifle and
then halting, called to the villain: “Throw down your
gun—in ten seconds one of us is a dead man—one, two,
three:” and so the two stood, each with his bead darkened
by the other's breast—the sheriff's men, also unwilling
to shed blood; yet with a finger every man on his set
trigger—till Glenville called “seven”—when the robber
suddenly threw up his muzzle, and cried out, “surrendered!”
The next instant he was seized and bound. This was the
leader. His main accomplices were not discovered, and
only another portion of the stolen goods, which, together
with the robber, were now conveyed in triumph to Shanteburg.
That afternoon the fellow was lodged in jail, and of
necessity in the same room with the subordinate thief: yet,
while all possible care was used to prevent escape, in less
than forty-eight hours both contrived to get out! and from
that hour to the present, neither they, nor the remainder of
the merchandize was ever seen or recovered. It was, indeed
ascertained that they belonged to a small foraging party
from the grand gang of outlaws, whose head-quarters then
were among the islands and cane-breakers of the Missouri:
and so doubtless they escaped by the aid of concealed comrades
and all got safe off with Mr. Glenville's balance
in trade, to the army of the confederates. Perhaps they
lived to rob again—may be to murder; and for which latter
service our modern pseudo-philanthropists would pity and
feed them! Many neighbours out there will alway physic
such with lead pills—at least till Reformers have prisons
prepared fit to hold their pets longer than a few hours!

This pleasant adventure, terminated Mr. G's first essay
at store-keeping. It gained him, however, a character, and
no one would have become so popular in the New Purchase,[9]
but for mistaken opinions in the neighbours about “Mr.
Carlton's bigbuggery and stuckupness.” As it was, Glenville
nearly went over Simpson rough shod. And all these little
affairs aided our firm in sore disappointments and losses;
for then the senior would say—

“Well!—we might have had better luck.”

And the junior reply,

“Why, yes—and another consolation: this is not the
first disappointment, and it wont be the last!”

We, in short, thus learned to imitate the sailor, who, in
witnessing a conjuror's tricks, was pitched into the yard by
the accidental blowing up of some gunpowder; but which
supposing to be one of the tricks, he held on to his bench,
and exclaimed: “Well!—what next?”

26. CHAPTER XXVI.

Is the way of a transgressor hard? that of a politician is
not much easier. He is usually a slave first, and a timeserver
afterwards. In the Purchase the sovereign people

are the most uncompromising task masters; and he that
wishes to serve them, had better first take a trip to Egypt
and learn the art of doing brick without straw. In certain
districts, fitness, mental, and moral is a secondary qualification
in a candidate; he must be a clever fellow in the broad
republican sense. For instance, he must lend his saddle
to a neighbor, and ride himself, bareback; he must buy
other people's produce for cash, and sell his own for trade
or on credit; and, on certain solemn occasions, he must appear
without a coat, and in domestic muslin shirt-sleeves:
his overalls hung by half a suspender, and a portion of the
above named muslin curiously pouched between his vest and
inexpressibles. His face must wreathe, or wrinkle, with
endless smiles; and his ungloved hand be ready for a
pump-handle shake with friend and foe alike: because a
foe often presents his hand to ascertain if “the fellow aint
too darn'd proud to shake hands with a poor man!”

Is the man of honour invited to eat? he asks no questions
for conscience' sake, or the stomach's—the two things being
in many people the same. Is he asked to stay all night? he
never wonders where they will find him a bed—there being
only three in the room, and the family consisting of one old
man, and one old woman, two grown sons, three daughters,
and some little folks—he naturally lies down on the puncheons
with his certificate wallet for a bolster. Or does
he share a bed with two others?—then he recollects it is a
free country, and if one man needs votes, another needs
brimstone. And why turn up a nose at an oderiferous blanket?—has
a bed any right, natural or political, to more than
one sheet?—and why should not the sheet be under and
the blanket above you?—Let go your nose! has not a long
succession of “your dear fellow-citizens” slept in the
same bed, and between the same articles; and what, pray,
are you better than they to wish clean things? “Yes—
but I'm nearly stifled.” Tut man!—you'll never mind it

when you get to sleep. “But it certainly will kill me!”
Not it: men of honour are not so easily destroyed.

Would a candidate cough?—he puts no hand up, nor
turns aside his head. Must the nose be blown?—he draws
out no handkerchief. Would he spit?—he neither goes to
the door, nor uses a perfumed cambric, like a first-rate
clergyman. Why?—because all such observances are regarded
as signs of pride, and if you despise them not, your
election is hopeless.

“But, Mr. Carlton, we might transmit something offensive
to a gentleman's garments.”

“Well, what then! he will certainly some time or other
return your favour. Be satisfied, my dear Mr. Eastman, it
is only by giving and taking all sorts of matters out there,
you can, in some districts, ever secure your election.”

“And do any politicians endure all this!”

Certainly: and persons who aspire to rule ought surely
first to serve. Many remarkable men in Congress, be it
known, had a long training in some Purchase—their meannesses
are not of toadstool growth, if they are of toadstool
flavour.

Reader! are you religious? Then do write a tract to
be scattered any where on election days; and here is your
text or theme:—“Give diligence to make your calling and
election sure.” Among other matters, set forth how it requires
not one fourth the labour, toil, anxiety, watchfulness
and none of the base sacrifices of time, comfort, and independence
to save a man's soul as to win an election; and,
how the worldly honour is not worth after all even the worldly
price paid for it, and much less, the immortal soul usually
thrown in with the rest to boot.

We, of course, did not do some things, and hence Mr.
Glenville was soon permitted to remain in private life;
still we were compelled, for electioneering objects, to attend
this summer, several Log-Rollings. Folks in the

Purchase had no special days for political gatherings, or at
most, not more than two dozen in a whole year; for, in
lieu of such, every militia muster, cabin-raising, scow-launching,
shooting-match, log-rolling and so forth, was
virtually a political assembly, where our great men and
their partisans made stump speeches, and read certificates.
For the benefit of our surplus young lawyers, and other
ambitious gentlemen who have neither trades nor stores,
and who are desirous of rising above the political horizon,
and are meditating to emigrate to the west, we shall here
give a full account of one Grand Log-Rolling, which Glenville
and Co., attended this season.

On reaching the place, we found a large and motley assembly
of fellow creatures—men, women, boys, girls, horses,
oxen, dogs—all of whom, and which, came either to
aid or listen, except the dogs, and these came simply out
of philanthropy. They spent the time mainly in wagging
their tails, barking at rolling logs, and thrusting in their
noses wherever there was a pretext for seeming busy while
others were so hard at work; and yet, excepting some
three dozen snakes, four skunks, two opossums and a score
or two of insignificant field rats and mice and ground squirrels,
the dogs caught nothing the whole blessed day.

Indeed, some secretly thought it would have been just
as well if the musk-cats had been allowed to escape, for,
after their capture, the dogs were not altogether so agreeable;
yet no candidate or candidate's friends or even their
enemies kicked or whipped a favourite wag-tail. It was
hardly politic to curl your nose. What was a fellow fit for,
that minded such things?—was he the man to go to the legislature
and carry skins[10] to a bear.

The whole intended field, however, was resounding with all
kinds of cries, noises, and echoes, such as shouts—orders

—counterorders—encouragements—reproaches—whoas,
gees and haws—hold-on's and let-go's, and that's-your sort's
—up-with-him's to male logs, pull her this way, to female
ones, and down-with-it to neutrals; with clatter of axes and
tomahawks; the thunder of rolling trunks; the crash of
brush; the crackling of flames: and, over all, agreeably
to the “Music of Nature,”[11] were heard the shrill outcries
of females; the screeching of boys; the snorting and winnowing
of horses; and the howling and barking of dogs!
Never was scene more exciting; and our appearance in
working trim, was hailed with the most enthusiastic cheering;
which compliment being suitably returned, we speedily
joined the nearest working party. As for myself, surely
I never did halloa (holler) louder in my life: and I certainly
never did work harder for a whole entire hour, dresseden
costume, to wit:—in tow-trousers, cow-hide boots, and
unbleached hemp linen shirt, but without coat or vest, and
with shirt sleeves rolled above the elbows.

We did not attend the gathering purely out of rabblerousing
feelings; we wanted to hear the speech of ours John
intended to let off at Jerry: for something was expected today
of Glenville, and he was only a novice in stump elocution,
and so we had, being “high larn'd” and a “leetle”
of a politician, made John's first speech ourselves! Had
John been as great a nincompoop as Jerry, he could just as
readily have spoken nonsense off hand; but he knew too
much to speak sense without preparation: and so Mr. Carlton
had prepared the maiden speech. This, however, our
friend, like some manuscript preachers, delivered more than
once, yet always with variations and additions, till at last
the very theme and text were both changed, and our stump
orator gave towards the end of the campaign a much better
speech than he had commenced with.

Our historian, as has been hinted, did not figure a very
long time with the handspike, having luckily discovered
some pretext for soon joining a squawking and frolicsome
squad of boys, girls and young women, engaged in the
“niggerin-off.” Where it is designed to make “a clearing,”
the owner has all the trees, except some six or eight on
an acre, cut down, the others being “deadened;” that is
girdled by a deep cut two inches wide. If the majority of
the trees are thus girdled, the field is called—“a deadning,”
—otherwise it is a clearing. Now, it is to a clearing the
log-rolling, or, for brevity's sake, “a rolin,” pertains. In
order to the rolling the owner has had all prostrate trunks
cut into suitable lengths, and the bushy tops preserved for
fuel to the log-heaps; still many trees remain to be prepared
even on the grand rolling day; and such of course
require the neighbours' axes and hatchets.

In fifty or more places of the clearing, and in many parts
of the same trunk, logs are making, and with wonderful celerity
by another process—an almost noiseless process too,
and requiring, like Yankee factories, only women, girls,
and children. And this is the niggering-off. It is thus
performed. A small space is hacked into the upper side
of the trunk, and in that for awhile is maintained a fire
fed with dry chips and brush; then at right angles, with
the prostrate timber is laid in the fire a stick of some green
wood, dry fuel being yet added at intervals, till the incumbent
stick, sinking deeper and deeper into the burning spot,
in no very long time, if properly attended, divides or niggers
the trunk asunder.

The terms of this art are derived from the marvellous resemblance
the ends of chared logs have to a negro's head
—another fact on which abolitionists may dilate with
great pathos in the next batch of popular lectures, on the
wickedness of our prejudices: although, it must be remembered
that our black rascals out there invented the terms
themselves!

The axe is truly a mighty agent in the civilization of new
countries. Fire is a greater—and only in a New Purchase
and in the niggering operation is the famous copy-book
sentence illustrated properly—“Fire is a bad master, but
a good servant:” its mastership belongs to our log-burnings.
Without the aid of fire, the stoutest heart must be appalled at
the thought of hewing out with the axe a farm from our forests;
and yet with the aid of fire even females may achieve
that enterprise.

When the logs are all cut or niggered, they are then
rolled, but often dragged together, in different parts of the
clearing; and usually to the vicinity of some huge tree
deadened, or perhaps living, and waving its melancholy
arms over the mutilated bodies and mangled limbs of its
slain children and friends. Ah! happy if the tree be dead;
for it is destined, if not dead, to a dreadful end—to be
burned alive! Oh! poor tree! thy former friends are compelled
to become thy worst enemies—their severed trunks
are gigantic faggots! Alas! the pile rising up, as log after
log rolls heavily against thy quivering column, amid our labour,
and shouting, and uproar, that pile, now surrounded,
and crowned with a tangled world of brushwood, is thy
sumptuous and magnific pyre! Monarch! of a thousand
years, thou shalt die a kingly death! Nor would'st thou be
spared—only to sigh among strange harvests soon to
spring around—to sigh for the shades and shadows and
touching branches and kissing leaves of departed trees!
No—thou would'st not choose to survive thy race!

The piles are sometimes lighted at the end of the rolling;
oftener by the settler's family at their leisure. To-day,
however, as we were a very large party, and had, therefore,
finished the rolling early in the afternoon, it was resolved
that immediately after the candidates should have done
speaking, all the heaps and piles should be kindled at once.

Now to their praise be it forever[12] recorded, that both John
and Jerry had, as their friends allowed, “worked most
powerful hard and steady:” but their enemies must determine
whether this diligence was out of disinterested love to
the settler, or with a single eye to the vote of the settler's
eldest son, who, as his father accidentally remarked, would
be entitled to a vote at the next election. Indeed, as the
zealous partizans had closely imitated their respective candidates,
more unfigurative, practical and innocent log-rolling
was done to-day than was ever witnessed; and I secretly
made up my mind that our next log-rolling in Glenville
should happen just before the fall election; when we
could get the opposing candidates to lead the work. It is
not improbable that our host to-day had had the same
thought; at all events our candidates certainly sweat for
their expected honours; and if John did gain them he
worked for them—but Jerry! alas! he toiled in vain! and
alas! it blistered my hands! but then after this, I was
unanimously voted “a right down powerful clever sort of
a feller!” and more than one very pretty young woman,
“allowed she'd be Mr. Carltin's second wife, when his old
woman died!!”

After all, candidates are of some use; and the great majority
can do more good in natural log-rolling than in the
metaphorical sorts common among the dirk and pistol lawgivers
of deliberative assemblies. Nay, a very few hundreds
of rival and zealous candidates would, in a year or
so, if judiciously driven under proper task-masters, clear a
very considerable territory.

The candidate[13] to-day stood not on a stump to make his
address, but on a very large log heap, sustained by a living
oak more than three hundred years old!—an incident to

me full of interest. Our first speech, the first of the sort I
ever wrote—the first he ever uttered,—our first speech was
poured forth over the ruins of greatness—a prostrate wilderness!
The youthful speaker, the dear friend of many years,
stood on a funeral pyre! while above him waved the
sheltering branches of the tree, soon to be sacrificed and
writhe in a tempest of fire! And ours was the first, the
last, the only oration ever made by a Christian under its
protection! the grand old tree seeming to wonder at the
semi-civilization that had wrought such havoc in its domain
—while it knew not that the ceasing of Glenville's voice
would be a signal for lighting the fires!

The speech need not be described. It was, of course,
rather ad-captandumish; well written, however, but still
better delivered and handsomely varied. Hence, if it
gained no new votes, it secured the old ones. And that
is no light praise, where a word, a look, a gesture, or even a
smile changes voters; not to lose is then to gain. The
new settlers acted with the strictest impartiality—they divided
their interest. The father had “know'd Jerry's
father, and often heern tell of Jerry himself—and so he
would never d'sart an old friend; but the son, “darn'd-his
eyes (a peculiar kind of stitching) if he wouldn't go for Glenville;
as cos he hisself was a young man, and so was
tother—and as cos he'd give him a sort of start in his clearing,
he'd give him a sort of start as a public funkshune'er.”
And thus the balance of power was adjusted to a nicety;
and thus, also, if the new comers did neither party any good
they did them no harm: pay enough for a hard day's work
considering. For, certainly, a wide difference must appear
between having nothing in your favour and two somethings
against you, and so it was now; hence John and Jerry felt
(or at least said so) as much gratitude as if they had received
not a negative quantity, but a positive favour.

Complacent reader, I hope you never sneer at sovereignty?

Be well assured it can sneer at you, and always
will, if you descend in any way to be a slave. Save yourself
for a crisis—acquire reputation for honour and integrity—and
the people will then call upon you. The present
is the age of small bugs.

The speech ended, and we were divided into Firing
Committees to light the different piles: after which was to
be a grand supper previous to going home. Very soon
then at each heap, were assembled about half a dozen men,
while in all directions were tearing, scampering, screeching,
and yelling women, boys, girls, dogs and puppies—some
carrying fire on clap-board shingles—some with remnants of
burning niggering sticks—others with dry and blazing
wood—and the canine helps, some with sticks and chips in
their mouths, and some with the dead snakes and polecats,
so that almost instantly and simultaneously fires were kindled
in several parts of each, and every heap and pile
throughout the whole clearing. Combustibles had been built
in with the piles; and now a gentle wind was fanning all
into devouring flames. Yet, after the first sudden and
crackling blaze, the fires subsiding became, at a short distance,
barely visible; save in parts where dry logs had become
quickly ignited, and there a taper-pointed intense
flame, shooting up, would remain fixed a few seconds, and
then trembling from its own gathering fury, it would rise
higher and higher, and ever expanding its base as it elevated
the apex.

But by the time our feast was ended, and the shadows
lengthening from the forest told the coming reign of darkness,
a hundred-hundred fierce points of taper flame
gleamed in wrath from every crevice, or darted from the
dense clouds of black smoke; and in many places, several
points had united their bases, and were now in one broad
fiery mass, careering in spiral columns of mingled darkness
and light. Now fiercer winds were rushing into the vacuum.
The equilibrium disturbed through an aerial cir

cumference of many leagues diameter, the storm spirits
aroused and excited, came flying on the wings of a sudden
earth born tempest![14] This augmented the number and intensity
of the flames; and these, augmented, invoked in
their madness more furious winds, till a broad, deep and
awful tide of air poured through the clearing, with the force
and vengeful roar of the hurricane! and up leaped all the
fires in frightful columns and pyramids of living flames quivering
with wild wrath, and coiling, like demon-serpents,
around and up the mighty trees that sustained the pyres!
Here and there sheets of flame thrown forth horizontally,
and seemingly by an intervening body of smoke, detached
from the mass of fire, resembled clouds on fire and burning
up from their own lightning!

No breath of life could any longer be drawn in that field
of fire! It was abandoned as a wide tumultuating flood,
where unseen and dreadful spirits held a terrific revel
amidst the roar, and crash, and thunder of flaming whirlwinds!

Far and wide the forest was grandly illuminated; and
in returning home I often looked back and saw the noble
trees at the pyres, tossing their mighty arms and bowing
their spreading tops for mercy and succour—ay! like beings
sending forth cries of agony unheard in that fiery
chaos! Our home was several miles from this clearing, but
the next night, on ascending the bluff on the creek, we
could yet see in that quarter a lurid sky, and now and then
fitful gleams of brightness; and even a week after, as I
passed that clearing, the arena was yet smoking, although
nothing remained of that part of the primeval forest, save
heaps of ashes and a few blackened upright masses that
for so many centuries had been the living bodies of the
lately martyred trees!

27. CHAPTER XXVII.

Reader, will you be asked a question?

“Certainly.”

Do you ever go to the post-office?

“What a question!”

Well, but are you thankful for a daily mail?

“Pshaw! I never think about it.”

Just as I supposed. I was such a thoughtless person
myself, once. Now, however, I am thankful to Uncle Samuel
every time I walk to the post-office.

In our part of the Purchase the nearest office to Glenville
was at Spiceburgh, always nine miles off, sometimes
two or three more. To that office the mail—if such may
be called a dirty, famished, flapping, scrawny pair of little
saddlebags, containing three or four letters in one end, and
half a dozen newspapers in the other—the mail came regularly
(in theory) once a month, till the Hon. J. Glenville
exerted himself in favour of his constituents, and then it
came very irregularly once in two weeks. Sometimes there
was an entire failure in the saddlebags' arrival. And this
was occasioned by the clerk at Woodville office, who,
whenever he discovered no letters for Spiceburgh retained
the papers for private edification, and to be forwarded next
mail: at least Josey Jackson, our post-master, said so
Sometimes our mail failed because of high waters; although
our post-boy, Jack Adams, a spunky little chap, would often
in such cases swim over: but then the half-starved wallet

was twice washed away, and when recovered, the news in
both letters and papers was too diluted and washy for any
practical purpose.

Reader, it was truly sickening, after waiting four endless
weeks with the most exemplary impatience, and after
toiling, not over, but through a road always nearly impassable,
and when passable full of peril to learn that no
mail would arrive till next month; or what was even worse,
that it had indeed come, but with only one letter, and that
maybe for the Big-Bear-wallow settlement![15] The faint
hope that sustained one in the lonely and wearisome path
now became despair! and yet, all that wet, long, tangled
way to repass! and no mail again for four other hateful
weeks! No wonder we finally ceased from all correspondence,
contenting ourselves with hiring a man, with a remnant
of sole leather, to bring our newspapers when he
could get them: which luckily he did as often as once in
three months! No wonder during all our western sojourn,
if the world never heard of us: although in this we had a
very ample revenge, as in that time, we heard nothing of
the world, and I think, even cared less.

But this autumn, I expected a letter from my old friend
Clarence; and so, on a delightful September morning, off I
started, confident of finding his letter. The road, also, was
less bad, and with diligence we should get home about the
middle of the afternoon. And Dick, too, was in high spirits;
for he always regarded as a holiday, the exchange of
the bark mill for such a jaunt; and he now trotted along
the bottomland with voluntary and most uncommon speed
till of a sudden the old fellow scented, or saw, or heard
something which made him very fidgetty and uneasy.

What could it be? Dick, it was known, had some finical

ways, but he was now manifestly alarmed, and made some
desperate attempts to wheel—when, sure enough, a strange
figure emerged from the tall rank weeds into the road before
us, and continued to move in front, and apparently
never having noticed our approach. This figure was undeniably
human; and yet at bottom it seemed a man, for
there were a man's tow-linen breeches; at top, a woman;
for there was the semblance of a short gown, and, indeed,
a female kerchief on the neck, and a sun-bonnet on the
head! Then again the apparition wore enormous masculine
leather boots, and under one arm carried a club;
although both of the hands seemed to be holding above the
hips, rolls of woollen cloth, very much like a furled petticoat!
Whether the affair would turn out a man dressed in woman's
upper articles, or a woman, in man's lower ones, was
yet to be discovered. The suspense, however, was not
long; for at the noise of Dick's sneezing, (who saw how
matters stood, and gave warning by way of delicacy,) the
hands of the figure instantly relaxed their hold on the linsey
rolls; and down dropped a sudden curtain all round
over breeches and boots, in the shape of a veritable petticoat!
and before us walked a genuine daughter of the
woods!

The universally favourite attire of females (indescribables)
is not, we presume, to be traced to French milliners,
male or female. It originated in the necessities of a new
country, where women must hunt cows hid in tall weeds
and coarse grass, in dewy or frosty mornings. And to that
is owing brief frocks; although out there, such when allowed
to fall to the natural hang of the articles, shut from
view the indescribables—or very nearly so. Dressed thus
in the husband's boots as well as his thingamies, (the limbs
of which are worn as our fathers wore them within, and
not without the boots,) our fair lady this morning, bade defiance

to wet grass, running briars, snake-bites, ticks, and
all and every evil incident to cow-hunting!

Of course we exchanged compliments on passing; but
Dick was so dumb-founded at the miraculous transformation
on the sudden fall of the screen, that he shyed and passed
without a word: the truth is, I was all but frightened
myself!

I need not tell all the silly things that entered my mind
at the thought of such an exhibition in certain places and
assemblies—but I was not fairly recovered on reaching
Spiceburgh; and the event had perhaps rather increased my
good-nature, and encouraged the hope of finding a long-expected
letter. On approaching the cabin-office, and
while hanging Dick to a gate post, a glimpse caught of
Josey trying to escape out of a back door into the woods
gave me a sudden pang; for this was Josey's way of getting
off, when there was no letters for his friends, and leaving
the matter of explanation to his wife as he “naterally
hated,” he said, “to see folks so powerful disapinted.” But
I was too quick, and so hailed:

“Hillo! the house, Josey!”

“Ah! hillo; how are you? come walk in—I was a sort
a steppin round the other way—powerful fine day.”

“Very—Well, Josey, anything this time?”

“Well—there was three letters and some papers kim
day afore yesterday—but I wan't in—and Polly, she put
them away—and I aint heern her say that thare was anything
for your settlement up thare.”

“Why, Josey, one must be for me; it can't be possible
the letter, that a month ago was to be here, is not come
this mail!”

“Well—I should a sort a think one of them mought be
the letter. Glenville's goin a-head most powerful in this
part of the district—Jerry's a clever feller—but we go tother
way down here: if Glenville gits in, we'll try old Uncle

Sam, and have the mail twice a month in these here diggins.”

“Yes, but if they manage no better at Woodville or some
other place, we shall only be disappointed twice a month
instead of once.”

“He! he! he!—yes—well, let's go back, Mr. Carltin,
and take a look.”

Josey's wife now appeared en dishabille,[16] being occupied
with her wash-tub in the space between the cabin and the
kitchen; when Josey, to prepare and smooth the way to
my disappointment, said to his lady:

“See here, Polly! don't you think one of them thare
three letters mought be for Mr. Carltin?”

“Nan!” (she heard well enough.)

“Don't you think one of them thare three letters what kim
day afore yesterday, mought be for Mr. Carltin?”

“Well, no, I don't jist ezactly mind—(remember)—but I
a sorter allow maybe prehaps two's for the Snake Run Sittlemint's
folk's”—(washing away as if the article was very
hard to get clean)—“and tother was tuk out more nor an
hour ago.”

“Which way, Mrs. Jackson,”—said I, eagerly, as a
glimmer of hope arose—“which way did the person come
—perhaps it was Tommy Robison, as I asked him the
other day to call here, and ——”

“Well—I kind a sorter think as maybe prehaps the man
said the letter was hissin—and I actially seed him a readin
on it!”

“Well,” said Josey, very tenderly—“let's go into the
back room anyhow, and overhaul the bureau—maybe some
how or nother we mought a overlooked last month—or may
be arter all one of the two's yourn.”

The back room was a closet boxed off with poplar boards,

its junctures pasted over with strips of deceased newspapers;
and it held a bed for the postmaster and mistress,
and—a bureau, of which two drawers were Uncle Sam's
Cabinet, the top drawer for living letters and papers, the
second, (descending,) for dead ones. Into this sanctum I
was now invited out of compassion, with the privilege of
rummaging for myself.

First, then, the live drawer was jerked out, and Josey
and myself began our search with great system and good
judgment, collecting, as a preparatory step, all the living
newpapers into one corner, and which amounted to nearly
two dozen, two or three with envelopes and directions: the
rest, naked, and thumbed and dying:—all destined I fear to
the dead drawer. This completed, one letter only remained,
instead of two, and that sure enough for—

“Missus Widder Dolly Johnsin, head at Snake-Run—
kere of her brother near Spiceburg”—(on one corner)—
“case he's gone to Orleens, p. m., send it to the Widder
herself.”

But what had become of the other letter? Josey here
was much disturbed, as he knew it had not been called for.
At my suggestion, a shaking of each newspaper was commenced,
when pretty soon out tumbled the second one,—
and that too, for Snake Run. A very scrutinizing search
was next instituted under, and into, and around a half-knit
stocking, and some little calico bags nearly full of squash
or calabash, or cucumber seeds; and even a square box
half full of roasted store coffee—but no chance letter for
me could be discovered. I was about, therefore, to go
away much chagrined, when it occurred, that as a living
letter had been concealed in a dying paper, maybe, a letter
might have been buried alive among the defunct articles
of the next drawer: and accordingly a request was made
for a peep into that tomb. To this, Josey after a momentary
hesitation, replied: “Oh! its no use no how—still, if

it will satisfy a feller crittur, let's have the overhaul:”—
and with that forth came the repository of departed news
written and printed, and with such a vengeance—(for it
stuck a little)—that the dead things, many of them, bounced
into the middle of the room, like criminals' carcasses
when galvanized.

Ah! painful sight! that drawer like other graves (in
some cities) was too full!—it contained more than the living
world! And the frightful way that papers and letters
were huddled, must soon have killed a delicate and sensitive
thing—a love letter, for instance, if by any mischance
it had come down from the upper drawer alive! Well, we
rummaged—and shook—and tossed—and pitched for a good
quarter of an hour, till out leaped a letter,—a real living letter—folded
in a civilized way—and actually superscribed:

“Robert Carlton, Esq. Glenville Settlement, &c. &c.”
—and post-marked—“Princeton, N. J.”

Josey was, of course, completely mystified, and began
twenty awkward apologies; but, although not a little provoked,
I was so rejoiced at the resurrection of my letter,
and Josey was so sorry, and after all, so clever a fellow,
that he was cordially forgiven:[17] —and that, reader, argues
me not spiteful.

I now prepared to return home: and just then, a young
chap rode by on his way to Johnson's store; for Spiceburg
was a large village, containing, first, Mr. Johnson's Store;
second, a blacksmith's establishment: and third, Josey
Jackson's post-office, which last was also a tavern, and
now becoming a kind of opposition store: although an opposition
post-office would have been more serviceable,
both to town and country. The chap named, immediately
hailed me, and made a proposal for me to wait till he had

done his purchases, when we could ride home in company.
As Sam lived in an adjoining settlement, and I really want
ed company, (to say nothing of political news,)—I readily
agreed to wait, although we well knew it would be some
hours before the bargains were concluded.

In a New urchase country, “going to store” is as much
for recreation as business, and preparation is made as for
any other treat or amusement. The store is, too, the place
for news, recent and stale—for gymnastics, wrestling, pitching
quoits, running,—for rifle shooting—for story-telling,
&c.—and hence, a purchaser's stay is not in direct ratio
to his intended bargains, but rather in the inverse; a fellow
having only six cents to spend, will sometimes lounge in and
around a store for six hours! Nor must even that be wholly
imputed to the fellow's idleness. It is in part, owing to
his unwillingness to part with—cash; and when it is considered
how very difficult it was then, and maybe now, in
the New Purchase to get hold of “silver,” then it will appear
that to lay out even a fippenny-bit must have become a matter
for very solemn reflection, and very lengthy chaffering. In my
time, rarelyindeed, could two cash dollars be seen circulating
together; and having then no banks, and being suspicious
of all foreign paper, we carried on our operations almost
exclusively by trade. For goods, store-keepers received
the vast bulk of their pay in produce, which was converted
into cash at Louisville, Cincinnati, or more frequently at
New-Orleans. The great house of Glenville and Carlton
paid for all things in—leather. Hence, occasionally
when a wood-chopper must have shoes and yet had no produce,
but offered to pay in “chopping,” we, not needing
that article, and being indebted to several neighbours who
did, used to send the man and his axe as the circulating
medium in demand among our own creditors, to chop out the
bills against us. Indeed, it was out there some wise statesmen
of hard currency memory, learned to do without banks,

and therefore, wished to let the neighbors in here have a
taste of their experience: although cash seems difficult to
find anywhere, for we of the New Purchase supposed the
searcity owing to the non-existence of banks, while we of
the Old Purchase, attribute the scarcity to their existence.
For my part, I must ever think the leather currency better
than the mere paper one; and that the latter, although not
so often tramped under foot as the other, yet still more deserves
it.

My friend Sam to-day had come to town with two silverfippenny-bits,
and a roll of tow linen; and he intended to
buy four panes of glass, 8 by 10's, half a pound of store,
coffee, eighth of a pound of store-tea, one quarter pound of
gunpowder, and a pound of lead: also, if they could be got
cheap, a string of button moles and a needle. Sam prided
himself on being a hard hand at a bargain, and Mr. Johnson,
I well knew, although an honest man, was a prudent dealer;
and, therefore, I determined to remain in the store and witness
the trading. The colloquy opened thus, after Sam had
deposited his roll of linen on the counter:

“Well, Johnson, you don't want no tow linen to-day, I
allow—do you?”

“If 'tis good. What do you want for it?”

“I allow to take half trade and half silveras near about
as we can fix it.”

“Sam, you're joking—we don't give cash for anything
but pork and lard.”

“That's powerful stingy—well, what's this piece worth
—its powerful fine.”

“This;” (examining)—'tis pretty good—'tis worth ten
cents in silver. We give twelve in trade.”

“Ketch a duck asleep!—if that 'ere tow linen thare aint
worth fifteen cents in store-tea or coffee ither, I'll bet old
Nan—(his rifle)—again two-shot gun! Howe'er I'll track

round a little—I wants any how to go over to the post-office,
maybe thare's a paper come.”

Now this, reader, was all gum; Sam could not read a
word. He intended this as a threat to deal in the opposition
store, and Mr. Johnson so understood it: in fact he
had anticipated such a move, and for that purpose had underrated
the linen, intending to rise to the true value as if
induced so to do by Sam's superior dexterity, by which the
linen would be secured and his customer pleased. And
therefore, Mr. J. thus answered:

“Sam! Sam! you're a hard Christian: but I've large
payments at Louisville, and you've been a pretty good
customer, and a cent or so aint much—and rather than let
you go to Josey's, I ll give you thirteen cents.”

Now this Sam thought just one cent higher than the
linen was worth; yet it was in reality precisely half a cent
less—and that other half cent Johnson intended finally to
give him. Hence whem Sam replied, “Well! I raythur
allow as maybe prehaps Josey would a sorter give fourteen
cents; but I don't like to d'sart old friends, and so says I,
jist gimme thirteen and a half cents, and it's trade!” it was
what Mr. Johnson was prepared to hear. Accordingly,
after affecting to consult a book of prices, (I think it was
an old counting-house almanac) and after figuring away at
the double rule of three in vulgar fractions, at all which Sam
stared as at a magical operation, Johnson at last looked up'
and scratching his head, said:—

“Let's see—eight-sixteenths is four-eighths, and that
is one half—and half is two-fourths—and five per cent—
and tow linen at a discount—why, Sam, you'll break a
fellow some day or other—still I can't lose more than a
fraction of a cent on a yard, and I must not let you go to
Josey's. Well, I'll give thirteen and a half, and it's a
bargain. Now, what will you have?”

“Well, I'm goin to see how the new skow's comin on—

and you may measure the linen till I get back, and then
we'll take it out in something or nuther.”

And with that away went Sam, leaving Mr. Johnson to
measure off the piece; for while he affected to fear the
storekeeper would cheat him in price, he never dreamed
that he would either lessen the number of yards or miscalculate
the sum in his own favour. Nor was his confidence
abused, for Johnson was an honest man, and had
only used indirection to come at the true price, because of
Sam's perverse sagacity in bargains. I did not, however,
stay to watch the measurement, but buying a sheet of
foolscap, I retired to a back room where I answered Clarence's
letter, so unexpectedly rescued from the dead, giving
him among other matters a condensed statement of its
resuscitation.

It was a full hour before Sam's return; and then the
quantum suff. of tea, coffee, glass, &c. &c. being furnished,
the balance of trade was found against him, and
he owed the store precisely nine and a quarter cents. In
lieu of this Mr. J. offered to take one of Sam's silver fips,
which although a liberal discount in Sam's favour, he regarded
as right down Jewish usury; and the storekeeper
was obliged to book the nine and a quarter cents, to be
paid in “sang.” Nor was this conduct of Sam's so very
surprising, when it is recollected that for one hundred and
twenty-five cents could then be bought a whole acre of
land! bottom land! trees! spice bush! papaws! and all:
hence to ask for six and a fourth cents, was asking a pretty
good slice off an acre! Sam was, therefore, really
indignant.

He now was getting ready to start home, when spying
a spring of button-moles, he remembered he was to buy a
fip'sworth; and supposing a prime bargain was to be had
for cash, he proposed to pay right down one of his silver
pieces for the half of the string, worth in all twenty-five
cents.

“Come now,” said he, “Mr. Johnson, here's the silver
cash money, right slam smack down, for one half jist of
that 'ere leetle bit of a string—”

“Oh! no, Sam, we can't go that—I'll give you so far,”
replied Johnson, measuring a minor third.

“Well—I've traded a most powerful piece of linin here
this mornin—and I'll be teetotally darned if I won't try
Josey, and see if he won't give me more moles for silver
cash money.”

Our storekeeper well knew Josey had no moles, and so
after a feint to retain a customer, he let him go; but no
sooner had he got out of hearing, than our merchant took
down his string of moles, and laughing as he slipped off
nearly half into a drawer, he said to me, “Sam will be
back directly, and then I mean to sell him a little more
than the worth of his fip.” He then suspended the diminished
string in its former place, and shortly after Sam
came back, and began:—

“Well, I don't like, arter all, to d'sart old friends, and so
says I, jist gimme one half of that darn'd leetle string—for
it's time me and Mr. Carltin was makin tracks home.”

“Ah! Sam, how shall we live these hard times? but I
suppose if I must, I must—so down with your dust. And
here's a full half—and now take which end you like.”

Sam chose; and then the dealer stripped off the half,
amounting to a good eight cents' worth; while our man of
cash pulled out a small dirty deer skin pouch, and untying
its mouth, he emptied all the contents on the counter, viz:
two silver fips, three “chaw'd bullits,” a damaged rifle
wiper, four inches of pigtail tobacco, and three worn gun-flints.
But he was evidently even yet scarcely determined
to part with his cash; for he took up first one and then the
other fip, apparently more than once about to return both to
the pouch, and offer more “sang:” till at length, believing
he had got nearly double as many moles as he could

obtain for “trade,” he handed over, with the air of one
making another's fortune, the worse looking and more
worn fippenny bit; and then the other articles, together with
the button-moles, being put into the pouch along with the
widowed fip, he was ready to ride, and we in a few moments
more were on our way home.

My comrade was in high glee at the way in which he
“had made it off o' Johnson,” i. e. the way he had just got
the worth of his money, and which the storekeeper would
have readily given him at once, without so much plague to
his customer's wits, if Sam's own dexterity had not seemed
to make the indirection necessary. I too was in high glee,
hoping to secure an additional vote for our candidate; and
we, therefore, jogged along very harmoniously. Nay, as
it was now becoming dark, I yielded to a proposal for the
sake of company, to go all the way round by the Indian
grave, that being the proper path to Sam's settlement. This
reminds me of my promised tale of the Indian grave; to
which, after ending the present chapter with a pleasant little
adventure of our own this night, the next chapter will be
devoted.

Not long after our quitting the three blazes, and turning
into the unblazed trace at the grave, it became quite dark;
and we were compelled to ride in Indian file, Dick and myself
in the van, Sam and his quadruped in the rear. Be it
remembered, part of his purchase was (or were?) four
small panes of glass, intended to illuminate their new cabin,
and make its native darkness visible in the day. A sort of
window had, indeed, been made by skipping a log in the
erection; but our friends had begun to be richer, and it
had been lately voted to have a sash of four lights at ten
cents each, it being most specially for this, the twelve
yards of tow-cloth had been woven, and this very day sold
at Spiceburgh. And, even now, Sam, the eldest son, twenty-one
years old last Spring, was actually riding homeward

with the long coveted glass, done up in two sheets of
coarse demi-paper, and tied across two ways with strong
pack-thread—yes, all safe under his arm!

More than once during the afternoon had he introduced
the subject of glass and windows; and every conversation
would begin and end with a self-complacent, and rather
lofty look at the articles under his arm—the glass by which
their cabin was to be elevated in the scale of architecture,[18]
and the family established among the forest aristocracy!
Once or twice as we passed an old cabin without a sash
window, Sam would commence—

`Mr. Carltin, I allow this here glass here of ourn's near
about the right size—aint it?”

“I think so.”

“Well—it will look a sort a powerful—hey?”

“Very—we had a sash made last summer and it helps
matters powerful.”

“He! he! he!”—(a giggle of exquisite satisfaction—
like the cackle of a hen that has laid a new egg, or the
mild squawking of geese just emerging into the dusty road
from a hole in a grain field fence)—“he! he! he!—Mr.
Carltin, aint it a sort a funny them ere settlers what's been
in the Purchus longer nor us aint got no sashes?—I allow,
it looks a sort a idle in 'em.”

But now as we rode in the dark a fire suddenly gleamed
from the crevices of a cabin, upon which, Sam with wonderful
anticipative exultation halloed from the rear—

“Hillow! Mr. Carltin—that's Bill Tomsin's cabin!—
what a most powerful heap of shine his 'ere fire would
make through this here glass of ourn if they was all in a
winder—”

To this Mr. C. made no reply, for, at the instant his
neighbour's thoughtless, blundering brute[19] of a horse tripped
over a root on to his nose! and away went his rider, not
indeed out of the saddle, but off from the blanket, his only
saddle! and alas! alas! away went the brittle eight by
ten's!—and in spite of the forty cents paid in tow linen, in
spite of Sam's chagrin and almost superhuman efforts to
save them, in spite of the woful disappointment of the expectants
at home, the whole four panes, were all and each,
and every, so cracked and broken as to defy all emendations
from dough or putty! Yes! in one short moment,
and that a moment of triumph, all visions were dissipated
—visions of a window from without, and visions through
one from within!

Poor Sam! he was not hurt by the fall: although, I do
believe for a moment he wished it had been his arm and
not the glass. And certainly, had I not been present, he
would have abused his unlucky horse in very irreverent
terms, calling him as it was:—

“A most powerful rottin darn'd ole carrin—for to go to
stumblin and smashin glass that 'are away!!”

I tried to console my neighbour in the most approved
way, by telling misfortunes of my own, and at last did bring
on a faint laugh—(much like one a person makes in trying
not to cry)—by narrating the fall of our waiter of glasses
but still, forty cents worth of good tow-linen was no trifle
for folks in my comrade's humble circumstances to lose;
and I did so pity him as to say if he would ride home with
me, we would give him an extra pane procured to mend
our own sash in case of accident, and also, three sheets of
paper, which, when oiled and fixed according to directions,
would answer almost as well as glass itself. This cheered

him up a good deal; and on reaching uncle John's, a search
was instituted, and to our great satisfaction two panes were
discovered, which were both cordially bestowed on our
friend; and also two sheets of foolscap, with directions how
to oil or grease and paste them on the sash, and to secure,
by two strings diagonally fastened, or as he better understood
it—“kattekorner'd-like.”

Sam never forgot this small kindness. Hence, as you
may easily think, reader, not only did he vote our way, but
he became an active and rather violent partizan in electioneering,
everywhere giving, too, a magnific version of
the glass and paper story. Nay, on the election day he
overheard a person saying to another—“Yes, John Glenville's
well enough—if he hadn't stuck up folks around him
—and that brother-in-law of hissin, Carltin's a reel 'ristekrat
—and hates poor folks like pisin:”—upon which what
does Sam do, but forthwith strip off his coat and break in
with his doubled fists as follows:—

“See! here, I say, mister! you're a most powerful
darn'd liar!—now jist shut up—'cos case you jist go for
to say that say agin—if I don't row you up salt crick in
less nor no time, my name's not Sam Townsend.”

Happily, my complimentary neighbour had no wish for
that pleasant little excursion—“up crick,” and no farther
disturbance ensued. I would merely add, that passing
Sam's cabin a few days after his mishap, I had the pleasure
of seeing the sash in its place, with two glasses in the
lower tier and two papers in the upper: and to be sure the
papers were sufficiently greased; indeed, so well, as to
keep out light as well as water and air; although, in spite
of our use of “diagonal,” and it's being rendered into popular
language, “kattekorner'd like,” the strings were inclined
to perpendicular to the sides, and crossed each
other almost at right angles, and not very far from the
centre.

28. CHAPTER XXVIII.

When the Indian tribe were departing from the New
Purchase, a distinguished chieftain had suddenly died, and
been buried in aboriginal style in the spot known in our
settlements as the Indian grave. That spot I could never
pass without feeling myself on hallowed ground, often contemplating
the scene with indescribable emotion—ay,
more than once with unbidden tears. The burial place itself
was a beautiful natural mound, abrupt on the side towards
the county road, but otherwise of a regular shape
and gradual swell, being hardly indeed supposed a mound
on the approach by the Glenville path. On the summit of
this mound was the grave. It was inclosed by a fence of
small logs and covered with poles: while a rough post
carved with Indian hieroglyphics and its point or top painted
red, marked where the warrior's head rested.

This place was too far from Glenville for a walk, and
we never hunted in that direction, but, even when hurrying
on a journey, as I rode by. I could not pass till I paused
some moments to gaze, and with a melancholy soul, on this
resting place of the savage king; and with the most profound
sadness and shame, after learning that this wild and
lonely and regal grave had been violated!

Around that grave had stood a band of exiles and houseless
wanderers—children of the forest! Trusting to the
white man's faith, they had asked a few yards of earth,

where but the day before the whole mighty wilderness
had been theirs—a few yards where they might lay in his
rest their chief, their lawgiver, their father! Yes! yes!
there bitter agony of the soul had been felt, although proudly,
perhaps, sternly concealed! Mournful enough to bury
a king and a patriarch in a borrowed grave; yet was it
some alleviation that he was to lie in no dishonoured ground!
If there was sadness, there was grandeur too, in the
thought, that his was the only grave, and that it made venerable
and sanctuary-like so large a forest space!—ay,
that for long years to come white men's children would
point and say, “Behold that little mound yonder!—that is
the grave of Blue Fire!—the mighty Indian warrior and
chief!” That grave would remain a monument, speaking
to successive generations of the pale faces and saying—
“This was all once the red man's land!”

What would that tribe of mourning warriors have felt?
what would they not have done, had some fierce and proud
apparition from their spirit-land, revealed that the base
sons of white men would despoil that grave of its treasure,
even before the impress of the departing exiles' feet should
be covered by the fall of the coming autumn's leaves?
Yet so it was. Reader! the poor Indian is often cursed
for his indiscriminate massacres—has he no provocations?
Do not civilized and nominal Christian men, with deadly
weapons, watch near the sepulchres of their fathers and
sons to wreak sudden vengeance on the robbers of the
tomb? And dare we condemn the poor, hunted, defrauded
Indian, who, finding his father's grave desecrated and
rifled, cools the phrenzy rage of his burning soul in a bath
of white man's blood?

Once on my way to Timberopolis, I sat gazing and
dreaming on my horse, near that sad mound; when, not
without an emotion of fear, I saw appear a large party of
mounted Indians, going, as it afterwards was discovered, to

visit the Potawatamies living on a reservation in the north.
The party did not halt at the grave, as probably they would
have done, if no pale face had been there to notice: if
they had, although no sign apparently could lead to the discovery
that the sacred deposit was gone, yet should I have
felt, if not afraid, yet truly ashamed. Our way being for
several hours in their direction, we often passed and repassed
one another, and occasionally I rode among the party,
and held a conversation with a half breed that could use
a little English—till at last, they encamping on the bank
of the beauteous and silvery river, once their own! we
parted—my way leading across the stream and their path
still further up on its bank. I felt a strange wish to plunge
with them into the dark, tangled wilds of that vast forest,
where no white man yet lived—so strong is the love of the
uncivilized in some hearts!

But to our story. Several years prior to our arrival in
the Purchase, two young men, whose youth and ignorance
is their best apology, students of Dr. Sylvan's, on hearing
of the burial of Blue Fire, determined so soon as the Indians
should resume their march for the Mississippi, to take
up the body; partly for anatomical purposes and partly out
of rash boldness; for some nerve was necessary to the
work, while many lagging Indians were yet straggling in
the woods. And unhappily for our honour they succeeded;
but not until after a very remarkable interruption and temporary
defeat. And that defeat is my story. It shall be
given, however, in the words of the renowned “Hunting-Shirt-Andy,”
the leader of the party that terrified the resurrectionists,
and almost to insanity, and from whose lips we
ourselves received the narrative.

Be it premised, that at the time of our story, not more
than three cabins were between Woodville and the river;
that on their side the river, the nearest house from the
grave, (on our side) was more than three miles, and

beyond a wide bayou and marsh,—it being absolutely
necessary in passing and repassing to and from
Woodville to cross the river. In many places were fords,
and near them also dangerous holes from four to six feet
deep; and into these, not only inexperienced travellers, but
even we neighbourhood people often plunged; and hence
escape from them to a terrified man running from savages
would be almost miraculous. On our side, the cabin nearest
the grave was two miles up the river, so that if any
Indians came unexpectedly upon the young fellows, they
would be in hazard of meeting a pretty summary vengeance
—and not, I must say, wholly undeserved.

Our narrator was called Hunting-Shirt-Andy, mainly because
he lived like an Indian, and always wore a very
wonderful leather hunting shirt—(his second hide or skin)—
most curiously frilled, and elaborately ornamented with bits
of skin, birds' and beasts' claws, and porcupine quills dyed
red, and green, and yellow; and also to distinguish him from
his second cousin White-Andy, so named because he lived
like the rest of us civilized woodsmen in a cabin. The
story was given in Uncle John's cabin, at the united request
of myself and the others, and is as follows:—

Hunting-Shirt-Andy's Story.

“Well, Mistur Carltin, if you reely wants to hear about
them two young fellers, I don't kere to tell about that Blue
Fire scrape; but case you put it in your book, don't let on
about thare namses—as the doctor's nevy is a most powerful
clever feller and tended me arter in the agy, and
charged me most nuthin at all, although he kim more nor
once all the way over more nor twenty miles—and the
tother one what got most sker'd, is a sort of catawampus,
(spiteful) and maybe underhand wouldn't stick to do you
a mischief if he thought you made a laff on him—albeit,
he's been laffed at a powerful heap afore.

“Well, we heern the two was a comin to git up Blue

Fire, and bile him for a natumy, as they call'd it; and all
us neighbours was powerful mad about it; as cos couldn't
they allow the poor Injin to lay in his grave; and as cos the
Injins still a sort a squattin and campin round, mought
hear on it, and it mought n't be so good for folks's consarns
then. And so we talks over the thing, and allowed we'd
make the chaps let Blue Fire lay; and so, says I to Bill
Roland, Bill, says I, let's you and me make on to be Injins,
and skere them doctur fellers; and don't let them go for to
bile the poor red savage for the natumy. Agreed, says
Bill, and then we goes and gits ole man Ashford, and fixes
up like reel gineine Injins, and paints our faces red and
clean up our arms, away up here (showing,) and all on us
gits on blankits and leggins and moksins, and teetotally
greases our hair back so—slick-like, and I gits a bit of tin
round my hat, and we takes our tomhoks and rifles and
puts off and lies hid near the grave. 'Twas just thare, Mr.
Carltin, along by the black walnut stump what I cut down
the very next day arter for rails for Bill Tomsin's yard.
Well, thare we all on us lays down in the bushes on our
bellies, a little over fifty yards from the grave; for we
know'd the young fellers was to come at sich a time; cos
they kim to Squire Brushwood's the night afore; and the
Squire he sends up his little gal to ole man Ashford's afore
sun-up to sort a let us know: and so we was all ready,
when what should we spy a comin but the two young doctor
chaps with a couple of hossis, and a meal-bag, and a
spade, and a hoe.

“Well, we lays teetotally still, and they goes fust and
fassens their hossis to the swinging branch of that thare sugar
west o' the place, and then goes and begins a takin
down the pen, and when they gits it down, they off's coats
and begins a diggin like the very divil.[20] And jist then we

raises up a sort a on our kneeses; and all draws a bead
at that knot in that thare beech at the tail ind of the grave;
I'll show you the knot any day, and you'll see its more nor
half a foot good above their heads when they stood up agin
the beach, although they arterwards tried to make the knot
out only two inches above their heads; and then I gives a
leetle bark, like a growling Injin—and up they pops both on
'em, right under the beach, and looks about most powerful
skittish, and then we lets fly three balls crack-wack right
into the knot, and makes bark peel right sharp in that 'are
quarter; and then out jumps we and raises the yell, with
tomhoks agoin to fling —”

At this very moment our narrator was interrupted by a
terrific burst of thunder, which shook our cabin with much
violence, and caused the dry clay of the chinking to curl up
in dust around us like smoke! To persons shut up from the
view of the horizon, it had seemed a very fair afternoon
early in July; but while we listened to Andy, a single
cloud surcharged with lightning came over our clearing, and
using a tall tree within a few yards of our cabin as conductor,
it had darted its fiery bolt, which shivered the tree into
pieces, and filled us with a momentary, yet very intense
fear: and then, it rapidly passing, our few rods of sky was
clear and brilliant as before. After a short and revereful
pause, Andy resumed:—

“That's a most mighty powerful big clap of thunder, and
most mighty near! but it's not a bit more skery than our
bullits above them two young doctors' heads and the reel
Injiny yells us three screeched out! The way they drops
tools and made tracks was funny, Mr. Carltin, I tell you!
You see! I've seed runnin in my days that's sartin—but if
them chaps didn't git along as if old Sattin was ahind 'em,
then I allow I never killed no deer, and that would be a
wapper!

“Well—they divides, and the doctor's nevy, he tuk

strate up stream; and ole man Ashford and Bill, they
pretends they was a follerin him—howsom'er they couldn't
a ketch'd up no how—and so the nevy he runs clare up two
miles and gits safe into Pete's shanty on the bottum, and
sker'd Pete hisself so powerful he was afeer'd to come
down, till we sends up and lets Pete into the secret.

“But tother chap, he was so sker'd he didn't see where
he runn'd, and kept right study ahead slash through weeds
and briars to the river—and me slam smack arter him, as cos
I was afeerd he'd run in and git drownded; for thar's where
the water is deepish, and jist about where you swim'd your
hoss, Mr. Carltin—and so I runs and hollers like a screech-owl
—`stop!—doctur!—staw-u-up!' But the more I hollers,
the more he legs it; case he was more nor ever sker'd
to hear a Injin holler Inglish—Graminy! Mr. Carltin, if he
didn't make brush crack and streak off like a herd of buffalo!—and
me all the time a keepin arter, as I was sentimentally
afeer'd now he'd git drownded; but, darn my
leather shirt—(Andy would put this profane stitch into his
shirt when he was excited)—darn my leather shirt, if arter
all I could make him stop; and in he splash'd kerslush,
like a hurt buffalo bull, and waded and swim'd and splash'd
and scrabbled even ahead rite strate across and up tother
bank—when he stops for the furst time to blow and takes a
look back! And then he sees me a standin on our side and
without no gun, a bekenin on him to stop; for I was too
powerful weak a laffin to holler any more—but darn my
leather shirt, if the blasted fool didn't set off agin like a tarrified
barr, and wades clean in all through the bio! and
the buttermilk slash tother side! and never stopt again till
he kim to the three mile cabin! and thare he tells them
as how the Injins had all got back agin, and had killed
tother doctur and tuk his skulp!! And you may naterally
allow, Mr. Carltin, the hull settlement over thare was a sort
a sker'd, and sent out scouts and hunters to see: but when

it was found how it all was ezactly, then if they warn't a
mighty powerful heap of laffin, I never kill'd no deer.

“Howsever the Doctor's nevy was good pluck; for he
gits another chap to help, and two days arter when we warn't
a watchin, he digs out the poor Ingin and totes him over to
Woodville, and biled him up for a natumy for their shop
arter all—and so that's the hull story, Mr. Carltin;—but I
must be a sorter goin. I'll fetch that jerked vensin about
next week—and them 'are deer skins:—but afore I starts,
wont you jist play us a toone on that flute of yourn, Mr.
Carltin?”

“Most certainly, Andy—I'll play you a dozen if you
can stay,—what will you have?”

“Well!—let's see—thare's one I don't mind it's name
now—but a powerful toone; I heard Mr. Johnsin fiddlin
on it at Spiceburgh—but thare's somethin about river in it,
and it was talkin of the young doctur's splunge, made me
think of the toone.”

“Was it this, Andy?”—(Mr. C. plays.)

“That's him! that's the dentikul toone!—let's see—
what do you call him?”

“Over the river to Charlie.” And accordingly this
“powerful toone” was done now in first rate double-shuffle
style, with very curious extempore variations, and very
alarming embellishments; while all the time Andy patted
the puncheons with his moccasin'd feet, and seemed barely
able to refrain from leaping up and dancing; till the music
ending, he remarked:—

“Ie! Ie! darn my leather shirt if I didn't know 'twas
river somethin!—and by jingo, Mr. Carltin, if you don't
jist about know the sling of it, about as good as Mr. Johnsin—and
maybe a leetle bit betterer—and the way he makes
it hum on the fiddle!—I tell you what!! Well, well,—I
must be goin, but I should like to stay and git you to play
that 'ere meetin toone, Pisger,—(Pisgah, a great favourite

then with our religious world, but which had better been
named, Gumsnorter[21] —but I can't stop—I'm off—good-bye,
folks.”

And off he was sure enough; while I treated him during
his exit with Yankee-doodle. And this compliment Andy
felt so much, that he began capering, and yelping, and tossing
his legs and arms, till he reached our bars, which he
cleared like a bounding buck at a flying leap: but within
the bushes beyond he paused a moment, and gave, first, an
Indian grunt and bark, and then such a yell!—it rung in my
ears for twenty-four hours? Then once more he leaped
away, shaking the bushes, scattering old leaves, making
brush crack, and at the same time screaming out—“Sta-up
doctur!—sta-a-a-aup!” in all which he designed a scenic
exhibition of his late story; playing like other celebrated
actors different parts, first, his own Indian character, and
secondly, the flight of the young doctor.

Reader!—do you believe life is all moping in the West?
Now be well assured we have other recreations there than
going to church—the only one certain hic vel haec English
tourists grant to us and never use themselves!

29. CHAPTER XXIX.

Vide Voices of Natural History.—Vol. X.

Not many weeks after Hunting-shirt-Andy's visit, a
very great and yet very little stranger, for some time expected,
arrived at Glenville. Hername not before, but after
this arrival, was Elizabeth Carlton: and she bounced
in among us, after all, by surprise, and about two o'clock

one morning. A curious figure somewhere had been
missed, and the young lady gave an unexpected notice in
some mysterious way of her intention to join our colony,
precisely one week too soon: a common case I am informed
with all that have the right of primogeniture;
others, are better arithmeticians.

It had been arranged that our worthy friend Dr. Sylvan
of Woodville, should honour Glenville with a visit on this
occasion: but now, about nine o'clock, P. M., Dick was
scampering away at the nominal rate of six miles per hour,
towards Spiceburgh, with a pressing invitation for the company
of the learned Professor Pillbox, a member of the
faculty, and who boarded with our friend Josey, P. M.[22]
This change of medical gentlemen arose from the urgency
of the case, as Spiceburgh was not so far as Woodville.
No one in this very enlightened era can possibly think we
trusted Dick to deliver the request—(although if a four-legged
being could have done so, Dick was he or it)—but
still, to prevent misapprehension and the sarcasm of the
increasing critical acumen of the times, we now state that
John Glenville went with Dick; and hence, about three
o'clock in the morning, they returned, having secured the
professor and another horse.

This person—(of course, the doctor)—not being honoured
with any other skin or parchment than the one he was
born in, we, like the Great Unknown, the North American
College of Health of Yankeysville, do, by the native right
of every white-born American, our ownselves dignify with
the title of Professor. And never was title more appropriate,
as he professed even more than Brandreth's Pills! He
could cure warts!—eradicate corns!—remove pimples!—
and obliterate moles and freckles. He knew how to destory

beards so as to prevent shaving—and how to fertilize
the most barren skull till it would produce a large crop of
black hair, in case you perferred that to red, yellow, or
flaxy! Ay, he had never-failing remedies for fevers of
every type, grade, and colour—intermittent, remittent, nonitent,
bilious, antibilious, rebellious, red, saffron and yellow!
Hence, the Professor utterly and most indignantly scouted
Thompsonianism and all other loud-screaming quackeries of
our quacking epoch:—and setting the highest value on
number one, he cared not for number six.

His language, in bold contrast to his figure, was by that
very comparison heightened in its magniloquence; we
mean his medical diction, for other he rarely indulged in,
because language about common affairs was too small for his
large utterance. His were lofty words, and demanded a
lofty subject; and that his profession was, and admitted an
amazing technical grandiloquence. Professor Pillbox, M. D.,
was exactly one yard, one foot and ten inches—low. The
Professor's horse, on the contrary, was remarkably high,
large and spirited. When, therefore, the Professor was
seated on his saddle, and safely ensconced between two
hugeous leathern cartouch-boxes made for bottles, barks,
lint, forceps, &c., and above all, for the pills and powders,
and the like cartridges, for his principal execution, he seemed
not dissimilar to a monkey-shaped excrescence growing
to the back of the steed! Now his modus loquendi was
truly gigantic! and not only did he always spout forth the
hardest technicalities, but even these laden with additimentalities
and elongated elaborifications of sesquipedalia:
which last he would freely have bought of us if not for silver,
yet for trade and in exchange for what he always
styled his “medicamentums!”

Poultices, with Professor Pillbox, were always cataplasms
—and the patient who had only barked his shins, was always
greatly terrified on hearing that “there was manifest

symptomatic manifestationst hrough the outer exterior epidermis
of his having infracted the tibia!”—for the poor
wretch at once gave over his legs as ruined after that awful
sentence on them! Doses of salts were never mixed
with water and swallowed in our Professor's practice, but
he “prepared an aquatical solution of the sulphate of magnesia,
and then—exhibited it!”—i. e. made the patient
look at it before he drank. In this way the disagreeable
taste was properly increased, and so, to speak in style, the
“medicamentum seemed to act with still greater potential
efficacity:”—for indeed, some robustious stomachs out there
that would never have budged at the plain dose, were pretty
well stirred by “an aquatical solution!”—proving the virtue
of words.

Our friend never bled a man—he only “opened a vein!”
—nor did he ever feel a pulse without parading a huge
silver watch, and seeming, with the care-worn and ominous
brow of Jupiter, (in Virgil,) to be counting the motions of
the second hand:—a curious contrast to Death with an
hour-glass! although to some nervous patients nearly as
frightful.

One of our neighbour women, who was often ailing, used
to send for Aunt Kitty to tell her what the Doctor meant;
whence Aunt Kitty came to be regarded nearly as “high
larn'd as the little doctur hisself,” and was elsewhere in
demand as “the little doctur's intarpretur:” but she always
resisted persuasions “to set up docterin” herself, telling
the folks “one old woman was enough in the Purchase.”

An honest woodsman went once with a severe tooth-ache
to Spiceburgh, when the Professor, after a long examination
of the patient's mouth, declared with a very solemn little
phiz that, “an operation in dental surgery seemed necessary
in order to extract two of the principal molares!”—
At which the affrighted sufferer said, “he was in powerful
pain, and didn't kere to let the Doctur pull out a couple

of his darn'd rottin back 'teeth—but he'd rather bear the
tooth-ache a hull year nor have the dentul suggery or the
principul mol'lerees ither done on his mouth.”[23]

The Professor did not rely on symtoms in the morbid
body itself: for instance, he rested not satisfied with the
inspection of the tongue, which he always had protruded
instead of vulgarly put-out of the mouth; but he wisely
kept two keen eyes out on the watch for external symptoms,—being
well disposed to that way of judging, which
determines, if a saddle is under the bed, that the person in
the bed is sick, or dead, from eating the horse. Hence, on
the present occasion, he came at once to a very infallible
judgment of the case, wholly by external symptoms; for
on hearing an infantile cry, which had commenced just an
hour before his arrival, and broken out at intervals since,
he instantly concluded, and without feeling any body's
pulse,or inspecting any body's tongue, or asking a question,
but with a very grand and imposing air, said—“that the
lady was as well as could be expected!” But he learned,
however, a very useful piece of knowledge, viz.—that
there is at least another thing beside time and tide that
waits for nobody.

Still, it was quite edifying to witness the anxious bustling,
and to hear the learned remarks of our dwarf Esculapius;
who, among other things, was constrained to acknowledge
that—“unassisted nature had yet mighteous
potential efficacity of her own intrinsic internal force, and
that she sometimes required only the co-elaborative aid of
a skilful practitioner to conduct to a felicitary tendency
her wonderful designs!” Hence “he would only order
now the exhibition of a few grains of his soporific sleep-producing
powder, to induce a state of somnorific quiescence!!”—because

he was decidedly of opinion that “with
proper care and no misfortunate reactions, the lady would
without dubiety become convalescent in the ordinary
time!!!”

And, would you believe it, dear reader?—all came to
pass precisely as he predicted!—and stranger yet to tell,
without the aid of the soporific powder! For that, by a
a blameable negligence, Mr. C. himself, who was charged
with—the exhibition, never mixed!! But then to atone
and for fear some living creature might accidentally swallow
the exhibition all at once, and so sleep too long, we
very considerately the next day put the whole paper of
somnorific quiescence into the fire.

In the morning, after a very early breakfast, Professor
Pillbox, having received the usual fee for his invaluable
aid in enliving the western solitudes, leaped with amazing
agility on his mountainous horse; which he, indeed, styled
“a quadrupedal conveyancer;” and was quickly peering
over his cartouch-boxes on the way to Spiceburgh.

But, reader!—beware of calling this mighty little personage
a quack: for he had, if not a diploma from a college,
a regular license from the State! Oh! the potential efficacity
of a true Republican legislature! What can it not
achieve? By a mere vote, or a legal wish and volition, it
can out of nothing—yes, ex-nihilo!—or next to nothing
create any and every man a lawyer—a physician!—a
teacher!—or even a Jack-ass!! And these creations all
become the greatest of their sorts!—greater even than the
very legislators that first made them!—streams getting
higher than their fountain!

No, no, reader, our Professor, like others of the kind,
had so great an abhorrence of quackery, that he would not
allow Josey Jackson, his landlord, to keep a single duck!
And two years after the Hon. J. Glenville's services ended,
when Professor Pillbox himself was sent to the House, he

had influence sufficient to procure by a unanimous vote,
the passage of the following resolution, and which remained
in full force when we left the Purchase:—viz.

“Resolved:—that no quacks but those that are licensed,
shall recover the amount of their medical fees by law.”

Vide Journals of the House, VI. Fol. p. 95.

30. CHAPTER XXX.

The future historian of the Western church may learn,
from this chapter, that the company of believers of which
Mr. Hilsbury was a bishop, whenever about three or four
such can be found, form an ecclesiastical court, with spiritual
jurisdiction over a given district. A court of this
kind was constituted his autumn in Glenville at the episcopal
residence. The smallest legitimate number of clergy
composed it, and every reverend gentleman was honoured
with an office:—Mr. Hilsbury was made President, Mr.
Shrub, of Timberopolis, Clerk, and Mr. Merry, (a bishop,
in transitu,) Treasurer. And thus was shown, after all,
the practicability of Locke's celebrated Fundamental Constitution
of Carolina, found impracticable in Sayle's province,—the
offices and dignities requiring every man in the
colony.

Mr. Welden, Sen., and some other excellent old woodsmen,
had seats as lay delegates. These, however, managed
only the secular business of the Assembly; for instance,
such as to bring in a pitcher of water, keep a small fire
alive on the hearth, and contribute each twenty-five cents

cash to the sub-treasury. Farther east, I am told, lay delegates
are even more useful, volunteering to let down
bars, open gates and the like, between the lodgings of the
clergy and the chapel where the court is in session. Normally,
it is said, the lay and clerical delegates are on equal
footing in the House, both having a right to talk either
sense or nonsense as long as they see fit; and yet, in practice,
the lay members are not considered as on a par with
the clerical ones. For instance, in debates, discussions
and so forth, the commoners are never called—brother,
except collectively under the appellation, brethren; and
even then prime reference is intended to the clergy. But
the commoners are termed variously, as “the worthy person
or member”—“the good old man that has just spoken”
—“Esquire Cleverly”—“Lawyer Counselton,” &c. &c.:
yet mostly they are all spoken to and about as plain—
“Mister.”

In my wanderings I have, indeed, stumbled into assemblies
of their sort composed of Misters and Brothers, where
qualified lay gentlemen chose freely to exercise their privileges,
and where “the person” or “the worthy old man”
has so spoken and argued a subject as to lead the assembly
to adopt measures much more common-sense-like and democratical
than some, and especially the “younger brethren”
at first contemplated. Nay, an acute and eloquent
Mister occasionally would be seen to demolish a rash
brother; or in our parlance out there—to use him up.
Hence, being myself a reformed democrat, this admixture
of Misters and Brothers in ecclesiastical Houses, did upon
the whole then strike me as the best and very best form of
religious associations for our republican institutions; and
then it occurred that if the lay delegates would always
qualify themselves properly and use judiciously and boldly
all their ecclesiastical privileges, that both State and

Church would even be more benefitted than ever by these
true republican bodies.[24]

We beg leave now to introduce more especially to the reader,
the President of the Court, the Rt. Rev. Brother Bishop
Hilsbury. Besides being pastor of the Welden Parish, he was
missionary bishop over a vast diocese, through which he
was ever riding, preaching, lecturing, praying and catechising,
and beyond which he often made excursions, to bestow
gratuitous and extra labour on the Macedonians—i. e.
wilderness folks that had no bishop to care for them. His
public discourses averaged, therefore, one a day, to say
nothing of baptisms, visits to sick, funeral services, cum
multis aliis: and the miles he rode were about one hundred
each week, or somewhere near five thousand annually!—
indeed, like other laborious missionaries in the West, he
lived on horseback. And when at home, a few days each
month, he retired not to his study, as he fain would have
done, but he betook himself to his cornfield: and not rarely
he wielded an axe in his clearing or deadening—working,
in short, not like “a nigger,” but a galley slave. Negroes,
under kind and judicious masters, work only little
more than the half of every day; a western bishop works
all day and part of the night. Brother Hilsbury was in
many perils—in the wilderness—in the flood—and among
false brethren; we subjoin a specimen of each sort: and

Firstly—we are to discourse of the Wilderness. Part
of an unsettled forest was once to be crossed by him to
reach a new settlement where he had engaged to bestow
some extra clerical labour. The path was nearly impassable;

and at sunset he was alone in the wilds, and more
than fourteen miles from the intended place. About dark,
he came to a deserted Indian hovel, where he resolved to
“put up,” rather than “camp-out” or travel in the dark;
and accordingly he dismounted, stripped his horse and secured
him by halter and bridle; and then had barely time
to get under the shelter of the half-roofless shantee, before
a tempest, long gathering its pitchy blackness, burst around
in floods of rain and flashes of keen fire with its appalling
thunder. By the glare, however, of the lightning, a rude
clap-board bedstead was discerned fastened to a side of the
hut, and on this fixture, after feeling with the end of his
whip if any chance snake was coiled in that nest, our
primitive bishop laid his saddle and other gear; and then
on and surrounded by these, passed that dreary night as
comfortably as—possible; and hungry, wet, and melancholy.
Having thus spoken briefly to our first head, we pass
to the consideration of the second thing proposed, which
was

Peril by Flood. Here, by way of preface, it may be remarked,
that reverend gentlemen intended for New Purchase
bishoprics, ought unto all their Christian gifts and
graces to add—the art of swimming. For want of this,
Bishop H. was in jeopardy oft of his life. Indeed, considering
his inability to swim, he was, my dear brethren, a
little rash; for in his company we have several times come
to creeks broad and muddy with “back-water” from a
neighbouring river, where the speaker, although a swimmed,
refused to enter; but our bishop either having more faith
or more courage, would, spite of all remonstrances, plunge
in, horse foremost, venturing on till the turbid waves reached
his saddle skirts and the tail—(of his horse)—began to
float! And that being symptomatic of a swimming head—
nay, of a whole body—our friend would return but still reluctant:

and we would then proceed up the stream till beyond
the influence of the back water.

At the time of his perilous-peril, Mr. H. was in company
with the Rev. Mr. Widdersarch, who also could not swim.
A large creek was raging with its swollen waters across their
way, rendering it necessary to cross or return; unless like
æsop's wise man they should wait the subsidence of the
flood. But that might be a long time yet, the waters still
rising; and beside it was absolutely necessary to go on—as
it always is when people are going anywhere, especially a
western minister, who usually, after riding many long miles,
and fording and swimming many dangerous creeks, to keep
with punctuality a gratuitous appointment, finds at the
preaching cabin a large congregation of—six: viz. the man
and his wife, with three little children and a help. For, of
course this thimblefull of folks would be too disappointed,
if the minister came not! And hence, valuable men feel
bound to be punctual out there, always at the risk of their
health, and not rarely their very lives.

The discussion in the present emergency soon ended by
the plunging of both brethren into the water; deeper, indeed,
than had been presumed! How deep was difficult
to say, the horses for some reason or other beginning to
swim immediately on entering the creek—perhaps, however,
unlike Dick, they could not resist a bloated stream
till the water went over their backs! Every thing proper
and customary was done with the ministerial legs to keep
the limbs dry; yet at the first souse those important appendages
were unpacked, all their capabilities being required
to hold on the riders—and nothing was now visible
above the turbid waters save two snorting horse heads, followed
by two human heads and busts.

And now the saddle-bags of Mr. Widdersarch, not being
rightly secured to the stirrup-leathers, floated off the saddle,
and, like hard ridden demagogues, went down with the

stream; upon which the owner not only made a very desperate
and very unsuccessful effort to arrest the articles,
but was, alas! by that very effort himself soused headlong
into the boiling waters! How, Mr. Widdersarch could
never tell, yet at the moment of his fall—(like Palinurus
grasping part of a helm in a fall from another poop)—he
felt and clutched with drowning energy, the floating tail of
his horse!—and holding to that he was carried safely till
his feet rested on the bottom. During all this Mr. Hilsbury
was in advance; but while he heard the fall and the cry
of his friend, he could render no assistance, having the
greatest difficulty to retain even his own seat; and by the
time he had reached the opposite bank in safety, his friend
could stand on the earth with his head above water; seeing
then the saddle-bags whirling in an eddy, Mr. H. hurried
with a long pole to a point whence it was thought the
leathery apparatus might be arrested. In his eagerness to
hook the bags as he leaned over the bank, that treacherous
bank gave way, and our excellent bishop himself was now
struggling for life in the whirlpool!

He was a man more than six feet high; yet in vain did
he try to stand on the bottom of his maelstroom, and hold up
his head in the world!—until driven violently against the
bank he managed with coolness certainly, if not presence
of mind, to clutch in one hand some roots in its side and
with the other and his feet to stick to its mud, till Mr. Widdersarch,
now landed, hastened to his assistance. In the
meantime, the saddle-wallets despairing of all rescue had
taken fresh start for some other port; but our involuntary
baptists running with poles to the next headland, were there
successful with their baitless bobbing, and had the satisfaction
of rescuing, and maybe from a watery grave, the
well-soaked conveniences! And so ends our second lesson.

The last trial was one of equanimity and patience—
more difficult to endure, however, than the other sorts.
Our friend, as has been often intimated, was forced to work
literally with his own hands. On one occasion he was
ploughing; when, to save his feet from injury, he had encased
or buried them in a pair of ungainly cow-hide shoes,
with exterior seams, like those of a hose, (viz: a leather
fire-engine,) such as no primitive apostle ever wore, and
most modern eastern parsons certainly never saw. They
had, indeed, been made at our tannery by a volunteer shoemaker
(such as a legislature will create some of these
days, when it is determined by them that every man may be
his own shoemaker,) so that they looked for all the world
as if they were vegetables and had grown on a shoe-tree!
Moreover, our clerical ploughman, like Cincinnatus, had
on no toga, and was in the state boys call, barelegged, or
to speak with modesty and taste, his limbs were destitute
of hose (or hoses.)

Now, in this “fix,” will any man of broadcloth and
French calf-skin, conjecture that our Rector's outer man
exhibited signs of worldly pride? And yet, my dear brethren,
the keen eyes of a parishioner saw pride in those
shoes!

“Impossible! unless it was deemed a pharisaical humility,
or a papistical penance.”

No, no! but on the contrary, the penance was not deemed
severe enough: for this Christian mister on finding his
bishop thus ploughing, reported through the whole diocese
that—

“Mr. Hilsbury was a most powerful proud man, as he
actially ketch'd him a ploughing with—his shoes on!”

I conclude, therefore, this discourse by asking you, dear
brethren, what would have happened if the Rt. Rev. Bishop
Hilsbury had in preaching sported a white handkerchief
and black silk gloves? or, horrible dictu (i.e. tell it not

in Gath) had he worn ruffles? Be assured we had some
rough and hard Christians out there who would have
deemed him an emissary of Satan, and one that deserved
burning on a log-heap!

Permit me next to introduce the clerk of the court—
Bishop Shrub. Of this gentleman we shall merely say, that
if a profound and an extensive acquaintance with all the important
and various subjects of ecclesiastical learning, together
with uncommon research in most other kinds; if the
command of elegant style in writing, and the power of rich
and copious elocution in preaching; if a pious and a conscientious
mind, an ardent zeal in the service of his Master,
and incessant labours for the good of men; if the most engaging
and winning manners in conversation; if all these
and similar excellences, possess charms, then would the
reader have rejoiced to know Bishop Shrub, and would have
classed and cherished him among the most highly estimated
friends.

As Mr. Merry will speak for himself in this chapter, the
reader may say what he thinks of this person after reading
his Buckeye Sermon, delivered at Forster's Mills.

Among the dogmata of the New Purchase Council, it
was ordained that Brothers Shrub and Merry should perform
a missionary tour of some weeks between 41° and
42° N. latitude, and in a region destitute of any spiritual instruction;
a region indeed almost destitute, it proved, of
inhabitants too, the thin “sprinkle” having, in all probability
sought a place free from all trammels, political as well
as ecclesiastical. The brethren took neither purse nor scrip,
and expected no present reward farther than the pleasure
of doing good; and yet they laboured as if in expectation
of being at the end of the tour, thrown into a modern[25]
bishop's see—not of glass, but of silver and gold and other

clinking evils. Having myself long desired to visit the
country now laid out as missionary ground, I begged permission
to join the party; which request being cheerfully
granted, away we started as—missionaries—hem! See
then, reader, “how we apples swim!”

During the excursion, three discourses were delivered
daily, the ministers alternately preaching, and the times being
usually 10 o'clock, A.M., 2 o'clock, P.M., and 5 o'clock
in the evening. In proceeding up the river (the Big Gravelly)
appointments were left for our return, and also sent
on before us, by any chance person found going towards the
polar circle. Nor ever did any one show reluctance to
bear the message; although on overtaking once a woodsman,
and begging him to name some place where we could
preach next day, at 10 o'clock, he replied:—

“Well, most sartinly, I'll give out preachin for any feller-critturs
whatsever—and Forster's saw-mill is jist about the
best place in all these parts—but I sorter allow 'taint no
use no how much, as folks in them diggins isn't powerful
gospel greedy.” And then, excusing himself from hearing
Bishop Shrub that same evening, he rode suddenly down
an abrupt bank of the river, and plunged into water, barely
admitting his large horse to go over without swimming,
yet he faithfully made the appointment for his “feller-critturs”
at the mill, although of our neighbour himself we
never saw more.

Our churches of course, were usually cabins, our pulpits
chairs; but the church at Forster's saw-mill deserves special
commemoration from the odd oddity of the place, the
audience, and the sermon of Brother Merry.

The church was literally in the mill; nor was this a
frame building painted red, with flocks of pigeons careering
round, or perched on its dormer windows, or strutting and
billing and cooing and pouting along the horizontal spout;
while, on a neighbouring elevation stood a commodious

stone house, the owner's and mason's names handsomely
done on a smooth stone near the summit of its gable; and
smiling meadows stretched away along the dancing waters
—concomitants rendering a mill so enchanting in old countries!
no: no:—here was a naked, unplanked, saw-mill!
a roof of boards twisted, warped and restless, on the top of
a few posts; the prominent objects being the great wheel,
the saw itself, and the log in the very act of transition into
plank and scantling!

No human dwelling was in sight, and it was afterwards
found that the owner and his men lived three miles from
the mill; that they went home but once or twice in the
week, eating during the day, when hungry, of cold corn and
pork, and sleeping during the night in the snuggest corner
of the mill-shed, and drinking both day and night when
thirsty or otherwise, freely of water and—whiskey. For
prospect around was an ugly, half-cleared clearing, with
piles of huge logs, not to be burned, however, but sawed.
The dam was invisible. A large square trough conducted
a portion of the Big Gravelly river to its scene of paltry labour;
and there the water, after leaping angrily from the
end of its wooden channel, and indignantly whirling a great
lubberly, ill-made, clattering wheel, as in derision of its architect,
hurried impatient along a vile looking ditch, half
choked with weeds and grass, to remingle with the sparkling,
free stream below!

Meeting, then, was to be held on a few loose planks,
constituting the floor, laid ad capsisum! The pulpit was
to be the near end of the log, arrested for a time in its transformation
to lumber; while at the far end was to be the
congregation—at least the sinners, who might sit, or lean,
or recline, or stand, as suited convenience. The congregation
was big of its size, consisting of the saw-miller, Mr.
Forster, and Mr. Forster's two men—and also, three hunters,
who accidentally hunting in the neighbourhood, had

chanced to stop just now at the mill—in all six sinners;
more, however, than are allowed in a Puseyite cathedral,
where conversions are unfashionable!

As we rode up, a few minutes before ten o'clock, the
saw was gnashing away its teeth at the far end of the log,
nor did it cease till we had entered the shed; and then, the
owner unwillingly stopped the performance, seeming by his
manner to say—“Come, let's have your preaching powerful
quick, the saw wants to be cutting agin.” This was
far from encouraging, yet Mr. Merry, whose turn was to
preach, began his preparations, observing in a conciliatory
way, that he would not hinder his friends very long, but
that we felt it would not be right to pass any settlement
where the neighbours were kind enough to give us an opportunity
of preaching. The preacher's manner so far
won on our sullen congregation, that Mr. Forster and two
others took seats in a row on their end of the log; while
two leaned themselves against the saw-frame, and one
against an adjoining post: Brother Shrub and Mister Carlton
sat among the saints at the pulpit-end of the log, like
good folks and penitents in churches with altars.

In this combination of adverse circumstances, great as
was our confidence in Mr. Merry, who was as used to this
sort of matters as are eels to skinning, we feared for his
success to-day. Yet he began seemingly unembarrassed,
holding a small testament, in which was concealed a piece
of paper, size of a thumb, and pencilled with some half a
dozen words constituting the parson's notes! And notes in
the New Purchase and the adjacent parts are always concealed
by preachers who use them; for the use of such
argues to most hearers there is a want of heart religion;
beside that no place is found in our pulpits to spread out
written discourses. To have used in Forster's mill-meeting
to day, any other than the thumb-paper just named,
would have been considerably worse than ridiculous—it

would have deserved a scratch or so from Mr. Forster's
saw-teeth; or what is next to it, a scourging from Lord
Bishop Baltimore.

Brother Merry quickly perceived that even the plainest
and almost child-like topics with suitable language and illustrations
failed to preserve his spectators' attention. One
man began to look at the ditch where now the water was
trickling along with a subdued voice; another, to cut a
clapboard with his scalping knife; and Mr. Forster looked
wistfully at his saw, evidently more desirous to hear its
music than both our preachers' voices together. Something
desperate must then be attempted to arrest attention, or
hope of doing good at present abandoned. For while true
that men cannot hear without a preacher, it does not follow
that they will always hear with one: and hence Mr. Merry,
after some vain attempts to convert spectators into auditors,
suddenly stopped as if done preaching, and as if talking,
commenced thus:—

“My friends and neighbours don't you all shoot the
rifle in this settlement?” That shot was central: it even
startled the Rev. Shrub and myself. The man using up
the clap-board looked like an excited dog—his very ears
seeming on full cock; and Mr. Forster was so interested
that he answered in the affirmative by a nod. “So I
thought. No hardy woodsman is ignorant of that weapon—
the noble death-dealing rifle. Ay! with that and the bold
hearts and steady hands and sharp eyes of backwoodsmen,
what need we fear any human enemies.” (Approving
smiles from all accompanied with nods and winks)—“And
no doubt you all go to shooting matches?”—(Assent by a
unanimous nod and wink)—“Yes! yes! it would be
strange if you never went. Now, my dear friends, I have
no doubt some of you are first-rate marksmen, and can drive
the centre off-hand a hundred honest yards.” (Here one
man on the congregational end of the log stood right up, and

with a look and manner equivalent to “I'm jist the very
feller what can do that.”—Ay! I see it in your looks.
I'm fond of shooting a little myself; 'tis very exciting—and
when I indulge in shooting, I have to keep a powerful guard
over my heart and temper. For don't we feel ourselves,
neighbours, a right smart chance better than persons that
can't shoot at all? Perhaps we feel a sort of glad when a
neighbour makes worse shots than ourselves—perhaps we
even secretly hope the man firing against us may miss, or
that something may happen to spoil his chance? And then,
when we make good shots, don't we walk about sometimes
and brag a little—even while we hate to hear any body
else bragging? Come, my honest friends, don't we all on
such occasions do some things, and say some things, and
wish some things, that when we get home, and are alone,
and begin to think over the day, make us feel sorry about
our conduct at the shooting? Come, we are all friends and
neighbours here, to-day—aint it so?” (Several nods in
assent—but no smiles as at first—with fixed attention, and
a go-on-Mr. Preacher-look, at the far end of the log)—“Yes,
yes, my dear friends, it is so—that is honest and noble in
us to confess: now there is a rule in this Book—you all
know what it is—a rule saying, that we ought to do to
others, what we, in the same circumstances, would wish
them to do to us. And surely, that is a most glorious and
excellent rule! Well, don't we often forget this rule at a
shooting match? and in more ways than one! And again,
every sensible man well knows how mean pride is, and
we all despise the proud—and yet, aint we guilty ourselves
of something like pride at a shooting match?

“Well, it seems, then, by our own allowing, we may be
secretly guilty of some bad and mean things, even when
we are not openly wicked and guilty, say of swearing—
(shot at a venture)—or maybe drunkenness—(one of the
sinners stole a look at the whiskey jug)—or any other bad

practice; and we see, a man in his heart may be very
proud like, and hate his neighbour, even if we do wear
homespun, and live in a cabin. (The brethren were
neatly, but very plain clad). Ah! dear friends, our hearts,
mine as well as yours, are much worse than we usually
think—and a shooting match is a place to make us find out
some of our sins and wickedness. You all know, how as
we are going through a clearing, we sometimes see a heap
of ashes at an old log heap—and at first it all seems cold
and dead, but when we stir it about with a piece of brush,
or the end of a ram-rod, up flash sparks, and smoke, too,
comes out. Well, 'tis exactly so with our natural hearts.
They conceal a great deal of wickedness, but when they
are stirred up by any thing like a shooting-match, or when
we get angry, or are determined to have money or a quarter
section of land at all hazards—ah! my dear friends,
how many wicked thoughts we have! how many wicked
words we say! how many wicked things we do!” (Winks
and nods had ceased—there was something in the benevolence,
and earnestness, and tenderness of our preacher's
voice and manner, that kept attention rivetted; and it was
plain enough, conscience was busy at, I believe, both ends
of the log.) “Well! now, my friends and neighbours, do
our own hearts condemn us and make us ashamed? Look
up to yon blue sky above us—that is God's sun shining
there! Hark! the leaves are moving in the trees—it is
God's breath that stirs them! and that God is here! Ay!
that God is now looking down into our very hearts! He
sees what we now think, and he knows all we have concealed
there! That glorious law we spoke of in this book,
that we have so often broken, is his law! Friends!—would
we be willing to die at this very instant? And yet die we
all must at some instant; and if we repent not and seek
forgiveness through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ—
you, dear neighbours, I myself, and every one of us
must perish and—for ever!”[26]

I shall not repeat any more of of Mr. Merry's discourse.
His point was gained. Attention was fixed; salutary convictions
were implanted in the auditors minds; and they
evidently increased in depth and intensity as the preacher
proceeded. Nay, when he in a strain of peculiar and wild
and impassioned eloquence, dwelled on the only way of escape
from divine wrath through the blessed Son of God,
our poor foresters gazed on his face with tears in their
eyes, and remained till the conclusion of the services,
without even the smallest symptom of impatience.

When meeting was out, the woodsmen cordially shook
hands with us all, and especially with Mr. M.; and expressed
a unanimous wish to have, if possible, another meeting
at the Saw Mill. Bishop Shrub was so tenderly affected
that as we rode away and had got beyond hearing at the
Mill, he exclaimed:—“Amen to that shooting, Brother Merry!
we shall never in this life see again these poor men—
but the effect of this day's preaching must be lasting as
their lives: surely we shall meet them in Heaven!”

Little specially interesting occurred after this, till our return
was commenced. And then early one bright morning
we turned aside to visit a deserted Indian town. A few
wigwams in ruins were the only habitations left for the
living: but in a sequestered loneliness on the margin of
the river, we found by the swelling mounds and other
marks of sepulture that we walked amid the habitations of
the dead! I have ever been deeply moved by the sorrows
and the injuries of the Indian—ever since childhood—but
now so unexpectedly among their graves—the sacred graves

around which Indians linger till the last! which they
so mourn after when exiled far away in their wanderings!
—when we looked on the pure white waters where the bark
canoe had glided so noiseless; and heard the wind so
sweet and yet so sad, like moaning spirits, over the tall
grass and through the trees—a feeling so mournful, so
desolate came over the soul, that I walked hastily away to
a still more lonely spot, and there sat down and cried as if
my heart were breaking for its own dead!

When we rejoined one another tears were in the eyes
of all! None spoke—the white man's voice seemed dese
cration! We were true mourners over those graves.
Poor Indians! at that solemn moment it was in our hearts
to live, and wander and die with you in the forest home—
to spend life in teaching you the way of salvation! Blessed!
blessed! be ye, noble band of missionaries, who do all
this!—ye shall not loose your reward!

To-day the evening service was in the neighbourhood of
Mr. Redwhite, for many years a trader among the Indians.
He being present insisted on our passing the night at his
house. We consented. For forty years he had lived
among the aborigines, and was master of five or six Indian
languages; having adopted also many of their opinions on
political and religious points, and believing with the natives
themselves and not a few civilized folks, that the Indians
have had abundant provocations for most of their misdeeds.
Hence, Mr. Redwhite and Mr. Carlton soon became “powerful
thick”—i. e. very intimate friends.

The most interesting thing in Mr. Redwhite's establishment,
was his Christian or white wife. She, in infancy,
had escaped the tomahawk at the massacre of Wyoming,
and afterwards had been adopted as a child of the Indian
tribe. Our friend's heathen or red wife was a full-blooded
savagess—(the belle and the savage;)—and had deserted
her husband to live with her exiled people: and so Red

white, poor fellow! was a widower with one wife—viz.
this Miss Wyoming! Much of this lady's life had passed
among the Canadian French: and she was, therefore, mistress
of the Indian, the French, and the English; and also
of the most elegant cookery, either as regards substantial
dishes or nicnacry. And of this you may judge, when we
set on supper. But first be it said our host was rich, not
only for that country but for this: and though he lived in a
cabin, or rather a dozen cabins, he owned tracts of very
valuable land presented to him by his red lady's tribe—
territory enough in fact to form a darling little state of his
own, nearly as small as Rhode Island or Delaware. Beside,
he owned more real silver—silver done into plate, and some
elaborately and tastefully graved and chased, than could be
found even in a pet bank, when dear old Uncle Sam[27] sent
some of his cronies to look for it.

Well, now the eatables and drinkables. We had tea,
black and green, and coffee—all first chop and superbly
made, regaling with fragrance, and their delicacy aided by
the just admixture of appropriate sugars, together with richest
cream:—the additamenta being handed on a silver
waiter and in silver bowls and cups. The decoctions and
infusions themselves were poured from silver spouts curving
gracefully from massy silver pots and urns. Wheat
bread of choice flour and raised with yeast, formed, some
into loaves and some into rolls, was present, to be spread
with delicious butter rising in unctuous pyramids, fretted
from base to apex into a kind of butyrial shell work:—this
resting on silver and to be cut with silver. Corn, too,
figured in pone and pudding, and vapoured away in little
clouds of steam; while at judicious intervals were handed
silver plates of rich and warm flannel or blanket cakes,

with so soft and melting an expression as to win our most
tender regards. There stood a plate of planed venison,
there one of dried beef; while at becoming distances were
large china dishes partly hid under steaks of ham and venison
done on gridirons, and sending forth most fragrant
odours:—so that the very hounds, and mastiffs and wolf-dogs
of the colony were enticed to the door of our supper
cabin by the witchery of the floating essence!

But time would fail to tell of the bunns—and jumbles—
and sponge cake—and fruit ditto—and pound also—and
silver baskets—and all these on cloth as white as—snow!

Reader! was ever such contrast as between the untutored
world around and the array, and splendour, and richness
of our sumptuous banquet? And all this in an Indian
country! and prepared by almost the sole survivor from a
massacre that extinguished a whole Christian village!
How like a dream this!

And thou wast saved at Wyoming! Do I look on thee?
—upon whose innocent face of infancy years ago gushed
the warm blood of the mother falling with her babe locked
to her bosom! Didst thou really hear the fiendish yells of
that night?—when the flames of a father's house revealed
the forms of infuriate ones dancing in triumph among the
mangled corses of their victims! Who washed the congealed
gore from thy cheek? And what barbarian nurse
gave strange nourishment from a breast so responsive to
the bloody call of the warwhoop that made thee motherless?
—and now so tenderly melting at the hunger cries of the orphan!
And she tied thee to a barken cradle and bore thee
far, far away to her dark forest haunts!—and there swinging
thee to the bending branches bade the wild winds rock
thee!—and she became thy mother and there was thy
home! Oh! what different destiny thine in the sweet
village of thy birth—but for that night!

And yet, reader, this hostess was now so wholly Indian
and Canadian that when she talked of Wyoming it was
without emotion!—while I was repressing tears! Alas!
she had not one faint desire to see the land of her ancestors!
Could this be Campbell's Gertrude?

31. CHAPTER XXXI.

The missionary party was dissolved at Timberopolis
and I set out for Glenville alone. One night was to be
past on the road: and I, therefore, so ordered matters as
to tarry that night with a friend, who had cordially invited
me to make his house my home in case I ever should
travel that way.

It was early in the evening when I reached his cabin,
but no one, to my surprise, appeared in answer to repeated
calls; yet there being manifest signs of inhabitants, I dismounted
and entered the house without ceremony. And
of course I found the family—but all in bed! Yes! the
mother—and every mother's son of them and daughter too:
—they had the ague!

Two, indeed, were a sort of convalescent; yet eight
were too ill to sit up voluntarily. Instead, therefore of being
ministered unto, I myself became a minister, and set
right to work, assisting the partly renovated son and
daughter in getting wood, in boiling water, and in handing
along jesuit bark, and sulphate of quinine. We three
cooked, in partnership, something for supper—what, I never
exactly knew—it was in sad contrast to the Wyoming
banquet! and that night I shared a bed with the squalid and
dejected ague-smitten son!

For the accommodation of the nine others, were four
other beds—the sleepers averaging thus two and a quarter
per bed. In our room were two beds in the adjoining one
three: an arrangement tending to purify the air, ten of the
sleepers being sick and exhaling fœtid breath. Was it
then so very surprising after all, that within one day after
reaching Glenville, our historian, having been with missionaries
in aguish districts, and having had a comfortable
night's repose amid this aguish household, should himself
contrive to get, in the very last chapter of his first volume
—the Fever and Ague? Alas! many a volume equally
promising in its beginning becomes sickly in its close: a
character perhaps of all books detailing life as it is! For
what, pray, is life itself, except a progress from elastic infancy
to flaccid old age!—from hope to disappointment!—
from health to sickness!—from living to dying?

Reader!—(supposing one is this far)—perhaps you have
discovered that the writer is disposed to laugh as well as
cry: not maliciously—but in a spirit of—of—“Good nature,
Mr. Carlton?” That is it, my dear reader; however,
our delicacy and good taste preferred another to praise us.
Well, we have found that such spirit, within its due bounds,
is a great help in sustaining misfortunes and adversities,
especially our—neighbour's; and it does seem a compensative
in some natures that their melancholy states may
be followed by joyous and sunny ones. And not rarely
have our elastic tendencies lifted us from deep and miry
“sloughs of despond;” and even yet, after the crushing of
fond hopes, and the endurance of exceedingly weighty
griefs, we laugh even loud although in a subdued tone;—
for the dear ones we laughed with in earlier days can
never, never join again their merry voice with ours!—but
then even in our tears we smile, because we trust to smile
and rejoice with these again and without danger of sin,
amid serene and perfect and perpetual joys!

This premised, what was more natural than that we
should laugh at the Fever and Ague—when our neighbours
had this twin disease? Indeed, hearing the patients themselves
jest about it, how was it possible not to join with
them? At last I was seized with this mirth-creating malady
myself: and of course you wish to know how I behaved
myself. Well, at first I laughed as heartily as ever
—just as I once did in the first stage of sea-sickness. And
then I took emetics, and cathartics, and herb-teas, and barks,
and bitters, and quinine, and hot toddies seasoned with pepper,
oh! with such winning smiles!—that the folks all said
—“it was quite a privilege!—hem!—to wait on me!”

Fye! on our hypocrisy and selfishness! all this captivating
behaviour arose from a persuasion that it would aid
a speedy cure! And for a time the enemy seemed willing
to be smiled away—with the “coelaboration” of the above
smile-creating doses—and, I do believe, we got to laughing
more than ever. But one day after my cure, on returning
from a little walk extra—(with a rifle on my
shoulder)—a very gentle, but rather chilly sensation began
very ridiculously to trickle down my spine—and there,
would you believe it, was our Monsheer Tonson again!

Now, be it remembered, here was a surprise and a cowardly
and treacherous assault, if I now for the first looked
—grum: besides it was evident good nature was no permanent
cure for the ague. Nay, Dr. Sylvan told me that
once he had the ague, and repeatedly after he was cured
the thing kept sneaking back and down his back; till on
the last occasion coming, after it had seemingly been physicked
to death like some of the patients, he was so incensed
at its impudence as to set to and so kick and stamp and
toss and dance and wriggle about, that the fit was
actually stormed out! and from that hour no ague, dumb,
vocal, or shaking had ever ventured near him! Had I
heard this in time, my insidious foe would have been treated

to a similar assault and battery. But, perhaps, so
violent exercise on my part might have only accelerated
and made fatal a crisis now approaching; for soon I became
so alarmingly ill that John Glenville was posting to
Woodville for Dr. Sylvan: but before he could have
reached that place I was raging in the delirium of fever!

Two things in the events of that dreadful night seem
worth mentioning: first, while nothing done to or for me
was known, I have to this day the most distinct remembrance
of my phrenzy visions; and secondly, that hours
dwindled into minutes; for seeming only to shut and open
my eyes, it was said afterwards that then I had slept even
two full hours!—and that my countenance and motions indicated
a state of fearful mental agitation. In that state
two visions, each repeated and re-repeated with vivid intensity,
and seeming to fill spaces of time like those marked
by flashes of lightning, were so terrific and appalling as
to force me to violent gestures and alarming outcries.

One vision was this. A gigantic cuirassier, more than
twenty feet high, and steel clad, was mounted on a mammoth
of jet black color and glistening, and moving with the
grace and swiftness of an antelope. On the rider's left was
couched a spear in size like a beam, and its barbed point
flaming as the fires of a furnace: while in his right hand
was brandished an immense sword of scimetar shape, and
so intensely bright as to blind the beholders. To oppose
this apparition was drawn out in battle a large army, with
all the apparatus of war, swords, spears, smaller fire arms,
and the heaviest artillery—the troops being in several lines
with cannon in the centre and rifles on the wings; and all
ready with levelled weapons and burning matches awaiting
the onset of the terrific rider—Death! Soon came a
signal flash from the heavens clothed in sackcloth looking
clouds—a kind of meteor sunlight—and at its gleam the
cuirassier on his Black Mammeth, like a tempest driven

by a whirlwind, swept rushing on!—the nostrils of the
strange beast dilated with fiery foam, his hoofs thundering
over the rocks and streaming fire; while the rider, upright
in the stirrups, poised with one hand his spear, and with
the other flashed his scimetar, and uttered a war-cry so
loud and clear as to reach the very heavens and appal and
confound the stoutest hearts! At this instant would I be
possessed with a strange and invincible furor, and pouring
forth shrieks and outcries in answer to the war-cry of the
warrior-spirit, I would strike with my clenched hands as if
armed with weapons—while the army awaiting our now
combined onset raised their responsive shouts of defiance,
and then poured out against us stream after stream of fire,
with the clatter and crash and roar of many thunders—but
in vain!—On, on, on we rushed!—the earth shook and
groaned and broke asunder into yawning gulfs and sulphureous
caverns!—and down, down, down sank the troops,
smitten, dismayed, crushed!—while the Black Mammoth,
reeling from ten thousand balls, and spears and barbed arrows,
with the fiendish voice of many demons, plunged
headlong into the discomfited host, and there falling with
the shock of an earthquake, crushed men, cannon, horses,
spears, into one horrible, quivering mass! Then from
amidst this ruin up sprang the giant-spirit with triumphant
shouts, and strided away to mount another Black Mammoth,
and renew with variations this battle of my exahusting
vision!

My other vision was as solemn to me as ever can be the
very article of death. Methought I lay in a little, narrow,
frail canoe, and with power neither to move nor speak—yet
with as keen perceptions as if I were all senses. The
canoe itself was at the head of a gulf, tied to its bank with
a twine of thread and trembling on its violent waves; the
gulf being between walls of rock towering away up smooth
and perpendicular for many hundred feet, and running with

dark and dismal waters very swiftly towards a narrow opening
through an adamantine rock. That opening was an
egress into an unknown, bottomless, shoreless, chaotic and
wildly tumultuating ocean!—I felt myself quivering on the
current of time just as it was sweeping into Eternity!—I
saw strange sights!—I heard unearthly sounds! Oh! the
unutterable anguish and despair as I lay helpless and awaited
the sundering of my cobweb tie—in the twinkling of an
eye should I pass into that vast and dread unknown!

Reader! was this really sleep—and did I only dream?
—or was it the summoning of the spirit to see in a trance
what awaits us all? Aye! be assured our dreams are not
always dreams! A spirit-world is round us—and it is perhaps
in such visions God designs we should catch faint
glimpses of that other state? Sneer, vile Atheist[28] —the
hour is coming when we shall sneer at thee!—for the
“wicked shall rise to shame and everlasting contempt!”

When Glenville returned from Woodville, he was accompanied
not by Doctor Slyvan, but by the Doctor's nephew—
one of the two young gentlemen of Indian grave memory.
And he brought a long paper of written and minute directions;
and among others, the Doctor's favourite plan of
changing the character of agues—for making a dumb ague
speak or shake. It answered well, I believe, with all patients
of vigorous constitution: at all events, if one could
endure it, nothing could so fairly make a dumb ague not
only shake, but speak, ay, and scream right out But when
that part of the prescription was read to me, I most obstinately
refused to have my ague thus converted: and yet as
the bare reading made me shiver, doubtless, the operation
itself would have made me shake like an earthquake!
Sticking, therefore, to my refusal, my dumb ague, as Doctor

Sylvan predicted, stuck to me; and for twelve long cheerless
months! Yet, here is an extract from the Doctor's
paper, so that it can be better judged whether my refusal
was altogether owing to obstinacy:—

“—— and then, as the shaking ague is altogether
tractable, his dumb ague must be immediately changed
into the other. Carry then your patient into the passage
between the two cabins, or into the open air, and strip off
all his clothes that he may lie naked in the cold air and
upon a bare sacking—and then and there pour over and
upon him successive buckets of cold spring water, and continue
until he has a decided and pretty powerful smart
chance of a shake.”

Ohhoo! ooh!—(double oo in moon, with very strong aspiration)—it
makes me shake now!

Well!—at long last the dumb thing left me; so that I
lived to write more books than two: but we shall not say
how often we “put on a damp night-cap and relapsed,”
nor how apparently near what began in laughing came to
ending in tears. Only let my reader draw from this case
two practical resolutions:—

First—to cultivate a fixed determination never to get any
kind of an ague—if he can help it: and

Secondly, to indulge no unseeming pleasantry when he
sees a neighbour shiver or shake—unless that neighbour
insist manfully that you shall laugh rather than cry with him.

Shortly after my first convalescence, the Hon. John
Glenville departed for the House; and there, among other
matters, he assisted in having Robert Carlton, Esq., appointed
one of the Trustees of the College at Woodville;
with orders to procure as soon as possible competent professors
and teachers. For this I wrote to my friend, Charles
Clarence, then in the Theological School at Princeton,
New Jersey; but his reply belongs to our next year, and, indeed,
to a new era of the Purchase, and hence, we may very
appropriately end here—a Chapter—a Year—and a Volume.