.

In the earlier times of the settlement of the State, fraught with
troubles with the Indians, who, more timorous than formerly, were yet
more skulking, Hamish was wont to take with hearty good-will to the
rifle, the knife, the pistol, and the firebrand. He was with Sevier on
more than one of those furious forays, when vengeance nerved the hand
and hardened the heart, for many of the pioneers avenged the slain of
their own household. But as he grew old, the affinity of his hand for
the trigger slackened, and he liked only the blaze of the benignant
fireside; sometimes he would laugh and shake his gray head and declare
that he reminded himself of Monsieur Galette, with his theories of
sweet peace in that fierce land, and his soft heart and his sinewy old
hand that could send a bullet so straight from the bore of his flintlock
rifle. And so great a favorite did Monsieur Galette become in Hamish's
fireside stories, so often clamored for, that he would ask his
grandchildren, clustering about him, if they would like him better with
a muzzle of snuff and a pair of ear-rings and a tear-discoursing eye,
and declare that he must take measures to secure these embellishments.

And so, gradually, by slow degrees, he was led on to talk of the
past,--of the beautiful Carolina girl who had been his brother's wife,
of the quaint babble of Fifine, of Stuart and Demere, of Corporal
O'Flynn, and the big drum-major, and the queer old African cook, and the
cat that had been so cherished--but he never, never ventured a word of
Sandy, to the last day of his life; Sandy!--for whom he had had almost a
filial veneration blended with the admiring applausive affection of the
younger brother for the elder.

When he had grown very old--for he died only in 1813--he had a
beneficent illusion that might come but to one standing, as could be
said, on the borderland of the two worlds. It came in dreams, such
perhaps as old men often dream, but his experiences made it the
tenderer. Sometimes in the golden afternoon of summer, as he sat in
placid sleep, with his long, white hair falling about his shoulders,
one of his wrinkled, veinous hands lying on the arm of his chair would
tremble suddenly and contract with a strong grasp, and he would look up,
at naught, with a face of such joyous recognition and tender appeal,
that the children, playing about, would pause in their mirth and ask,
with awe, what had he seen. And it seemed that he had felt his hand