t, and who had gone away
some years before, and was leading a wild hunter's life on the prairies.

"I should like to fall in with him," said my father. "It is the sort of
life I have a fancy for leading,--hunting the buffalo and fighting the
Red Indian."

"Better stay and settle down among us, stranger," said Mr Crockett.
"In a few years, if you turn to with a will, and have some little money
to begin with, you will be a wealthy man, with broad acres of your own,
and able to supply the Eastern States with thousands of bushels of
wheat. It is a proud thing to feel that we feed, not only the people of
our own land, but many who would be starving, if it were not for us, in
that tax-burdened country of yours."

My father laughed at the way in which the Ohio farmer spoke of Old
England; but notwithstanding that, he thought the matter over seriously.
He was influenced not a little, too, I have an idea, by the admiration
he felt for the farmer's only daughter, Mary Crockett.

My father had the price of his commission still almost intact; and it
was looked upon as almost a princely fortune to begin with in that part
of the world. So, as he received no hint to go,--indeed, he was warmly
pressed to stay whenever he spoke of moving,--he stayed, and stayed on.
At last he asked Mary Crockett to become his wife, and promised to
settle down on the nearest farm her father could obtain for him.

Mr Crockett applauded his resolution; and he purchased a farm which
happened to be for sale only a few miles off, and gave him his daughter
for a wife. She had gone to school in Philadelphia, where she had
gained sufficient accomplishments to satisfy my father's fastidious
taste; and she was, besides being very pretty, a Christian young woman.

She often spoke of her brother Jeff with warm affection, for he, when at
home, had ever showed himself to be a loving, kind brother; indeed, Mary
was his pet, and if anybody could have induced him to lead a settled
life, she might have done it. He had had, somehow or other, a quarrel
with her one day,--little more than a tiff,--so off he went into the
woods and across the prairies; and, as it turned out, he never came
back. She was not the cause of his going, for he had been thinking
about it for a long time before, but this tiff just set the ball
rolling.

My parents were perfectly happy in their married life, and might have
remained so had it not been for my poor father's unsettled disposit