sts; then, we would chance upon some small Indian settlement,
where we were regaled with hospitality, and spent half the night
listening to the low chant of a red man's song, as he deplored the
downfall of his nation, and the loss of their hunting-grounds. Through
all, my guide preserved the steady equability of one who was travelling
a well-worn path--some notched tree, some small stone heap, some
fissured rock, being his guide through wastes, where, it seemed to me,
no human foot had ever trod. He lightened the road with many a song and
many a story, the latter always displaying some curious trait of his
people, whose high sense of truth and unswerving fidelity to their word,
once pledged, appeared to be an invariable feature in every narrative;
and though he could well account for the feeling that makes a man
more attached to his own nation, he more than once half expressed his
surprise, how, having lived among the simple-minded children of the
forest, I could ever return to the haunts of the plotting, and designing
white men.

"This story of mine," continued Mr. O'Kelly, "has somehow spun itself
out far more than I intended. My desire was, to show you briefly, in
what strange and dissimilar situations I have been thrown in life--how,
I have lived among every rank, and class, at home and abroad, in
comparative affluence--in narrow poverty; how, I have looked on, at the
world, in all its gala dress of wealth, and rank, and beauty--of power,
of station, and command of intellect; and how I have seen it poor, and
mean, and naked--the companion of gloomy solitudes, and the denizen of
pathless forests; and yet found the same human passions, the same love,
and hate, the same jealousy, and fear, courage, and daring--the same
desire for power, and the same wish to govern, in the red Indian of
the prairie, as in the starred noble of Europe. The proudest rank of
civilized life has no higher boast, than in the practice of such virtues
as I have seen rife among the wild dwellers in the dark forest. Long
habit of moving thus among my fellow men, has worn off much of that
conventional reverence for class, which forms the standing point of all
our education at home. The tarred and weather-beaten sailor, if he
be but a pleasant fellow, and has seen life, is to me as agreeable a
companion as the greatest admiral that ever trod a quarter-deck. My
delight has been thus, for many a year back, to ramble through the
world, and look on its