ned a forest fight for several hours with a force of
Cherokees ten times their number. When seven of the white men had
fallen, the rest made their escape. Returning three days after to bury
their dead, they found upon the field the bodies of twenty-three
Indian warriors. At another time, as his son used to relate, he had a
very long combat with a chief noted for the certainty of his aim,--the
Indian behind a tree, the white man behind a fallen log. Four times
the wily Calhoun drew the Indian's fire by elevating his hat upon his
ramrod. The chief, at last, could not refrain from looking to see the
effect of his shot; when one of his shoulders was slightly exposed. On
the instant, the white man's rifle sent a ball through it; the chief
fled into the forest, and Patrick Calhoun. bore off as a trophy of the
fight his own hat pierced with four bullets.

This Patrick Calhoun illustrates well the North-of-Ireland character;
one peculiarity of which is the possession of _will_ disproportioned
to intellect. Hence a man of this race frequently appears to striking
advantage in scenes which demand chiefly an exercise of will; while in
other spheres, which make larger demands upon the understanding, the
same man may be simply mischievous. We see this in the case of Andrew
Jackson, who at New Orleans was glorious; at Washington almost wholly
pernicious; and in the case of Andrew Johnson, who was eminently
useful to his country in 1861, but obstructive and perilous to it in
1866. For these Scotch-Irishmen, though they are usually very honest
men, and often right in their opinions, are an uninstructable race,
who stick to a prejudice as tenaciously as to a principle, and really
suppose they are battling for right and truth, when they are only
wreaking a private vengeance or aiming at a personal advantage.
Patrick Calhoun was the most radical of Democrats; one of your
despisers of conventionality; an enemy of lawyers, thinking the common
sense of mankind competent to decide what is right without their aid;
a particular opponent of the arrogant pretensions of the low-country
aristocrats. When the up-country people began to claim a voice in the
government, long since due to their numbers, the planters, of course,
opposed their demand. To establish their right to vote, Patrick
Calhoun and a party of his neighbors, armed with rifles, marched
across the State to within twenty-three miles of Charleston, and there
voted in defiance of the plan