ieve the
monotony, for books were few and the express with mail from over the
mountains infrequent, and therefore discussions in familiar conclave on
abstract subjects, protracted sometimes for hours, filled the breach.
Often these questions developed on paper, for a continual
correspondence, as regular as might be compassed, was maintained with
the officers of Fort Prince George, another frontier post, estimated as
three hundred miles distant from Charlestown, yet still two hundred
miles from Fort Loudon. As a matter of public policy it was deemed
expedient that the commandants of the two posts should keep each other
informed as to the state of the country about their respective
strongholds, of the condition of the settlers, the temper of the
Indians, the masked movements of French emissaries. In dearth of
official intelligence, as the express necessarily went back and forth
with mail and dispatches from Charlestown, the correspondence
sympathetically expanded into personal interests, for the conditions
surrounding both posts were in many respects similar. Fort Prince George
also was a work designed with special reference to the military needs of
that region and the character of its possible assailants. The defenses
consisted of a rampart of clay, eight feet high, surmounted by a strong
stockade, forming a square with a bastion at each angle; four small
cannon were mounted on each bastion, and a deep ditch surrounded the
whole; there was a natural glacis where the ground fell away on two
sides of the quadrangle and on the others a strong abatis had been
constructed at a short distance from the crest of the counterscarp.
Within the fort were two block-houses and barracks for a garrison of one
hundred men.

The sequestered, remote situation of each post developed a certain
mutual interest and the exchange of much soldierly chaff; the names and
disposition of even the subalterns were elicited in this transmitted
gossip of the forts; in default of news, details of trivial happenings
were given, unconsciously fertile in character-drawing; jokes,
caricatures, good stories,--and thus at arm's length sprung up a
friendship between men who had never seen one another and who were
possibly destined never to meet. Of course all this gayety of heart
vanished from the paper when serious tidings or despondent prospects
were at hand, but even in the succinct official statements an undertone
of sympathy was perceptible, and the slight