ir to
deform the beauty of his raven locks, which fell down in masses nearly to
his shoulders. His stature was colossal, and the proportions of his frame
as just as they were gigantic; so that there was much in his appearance
of real native majesty. Nothing, in fact, could be well imagined more
truly striking and grand than his appearance, as seen at the first
glance; though the second revealed a lounging indifference of carriage,
amounting, at times, to something like awkwardness and uncouthness, which
a little detracted from the effect. Such men were oft-times, in those
days, sent from among the mountain counties of Virginia, to amaze the
lesser mortals of the plains, who regarded them as the genii of the
forest, and almost looked, as was said of the victor of the Kenhawa,[1]
himself of the race, to see the earth tremble beneath their footsteps.
With a spirit corresponding to his frame, he would have been the Nimrod
that he seemed. But nature had long before extinguished the race of
demigods; and the worthy Commander of the Station was not of them. He was
a mortal man, distinguished by little, save his exterior, from other
mortal men, and from the crowd of settlers who had followed him from the
fortress. He wore, it is true, a new and jaunty hunting-shirt of dressed
deer-skin, as yellow as gold, and fringed and furbelowed with shreds of
the same substance, dyed as red as blood-root could make them; but was
otherwise, to the view, a plain yeoman, endowed with those gifts of mind
only which were necessary to his station, but with the virtues which are
alike common to forest and city. Courage and hospitality, however, were
then hardly accounted virtues, being too universal to be distinguished as
such; and courtesy was equally native to the independent borderer.

[Footnote 1: Gen. Andrew Lewis.]

He shook the young officer heartily by the hand, a ceremony which he
instantly repeated with the fair Edith; and giving them to understand
that he claimed them as his own especial guests, insisted with much
honest warmth, that old companionship in arms with one of their late
nearest and dearest kinsmen had given him a double right to do so:--

"You must know," said he, "the good old Major your uncle, the brave
old Major Roly, as we called him, Major Roland Forrester: well,
K'-yaptin,--well, young lady,--my first battle war fought under his
command; and an excellent commander he war; it war on the bloody
Monongahela, whar the Fr