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By Root 1168 0

back to his mind a rush of childish recollections; and he lingered in the room with a tenderness of feeling to which he had long been a stranger. He bethought him of his mother, whose homely vestments he remembered to have seen hanging on pegs like those which he felt must belong to Hetty Hutter; and he bethought himself of a sister, whose incipient and native taste for finery had exhibited itself somewhat in the manner of that of Judith, though necessarily in a less degree. These little resemblances opened a long hidden vein of sensations; and as he quitted the room, it was with a saddened mien.2 He looked no further, but returned slowly and thoughtfully towards the “door-yard.”

“Old Tom has taken to a new calling, and has been trying his hand at the traps,” cried Hurry, who had been coolly examining the borderer’s implements; “if that is his humor, and you’re disposed to remain in these parts, we can make an oncommon comfortable season of it; for, while the old man and I out-knowledge the beaver, you can fish, and knock down the deer, to keep body and soul together. We always give the poorest hunters half a share, but one as actyve and sartain as yourself might expect a full one.”

“Thank‘ee, Hurry; thank’ee, with all my heart—but I do a little beavering for myself as occasions offer. ‘Tis true, the Delawares call me Deerslayer, but it’s not so much because I’m pretty fatal with the venison as because that while I kill so many bucks and does, I’ve never yet taken the life of a fellow creatur’. They say their traditions do not tell of another who had shed so much blood of animals that had not shed the blood of man.”

“I hope they don’t account you chicken-hearted, lad? A fainthearted man is like a no-tailed beaver.”

“I don’t believe, Hurry, that they account me as out-of-the-way timorsome, even though they may not account me as out-of-the-way brave. But I’m not quarrelsome; and that goes a great way towards keeping blood off the hands, among the hunters and redskins; and then, Harry March, it keeps blood off the conscience, too.”

“Well, for my part I account game, a redskin, and a Frenchman as pretty much the same thing; though I’m as onquarrelsome a man, too, as there is in all the colonies. I despise a quarreler as I do a cur-dog ; but one has no need to be over-scrupulsome when it’s the right time to show the flint.”

“I look upon him as the most of a man who acts nearest the right, Hurry. But this is a glorious spot, and my eyes never a-weary looking at it!”

“ ’Tis your first acquaintance with a lake; and these idees come over us all at such times. Lakes have a general character, as I say, being pretty much water and land, and points and bays.”

As this definition by no means met the feelings that were uppermost in the mind of the young hunter, he made no immediate answer, but stood gazing at the dark hills and the glassy water in silent enjoyment.

“Have the Governor’s or the King’s people given this lake a name?” he suddenly asked, as if struck with a new idea. “If they’ve not begun to blaze their trees, and set up their compasses, and line off their maps, it’s likely they’ve not bethought them to disturb natur’ with a name.”

“They’ve not got to that, yet; and the last time I went in with skins, one of the King’s surveyors was questioning me consarning all the region hereabouts. He had heard that there was a lake in this quarter, and had got some general notions about it, such as that there was water and hills; but how much of either, he know’d no more than you know of the Mohawk tongue. I didn’t open the trap any wider than was necessary, giving him but poor encouragement in the way of farms and clearings. In short, I left on his mind some such opinion of this country as a man gets of a spring of dirty water, with a path to it that is so muddy that one mires afore he sets out. He told me they hadn’t got the spot down yet, on their maps; though I conclude that is a mistake, for he showed me his parchment, and there is a lake down on it where there is no lake in fact, and which is about fifty miles from the place