now
that my hair stood on end, when I beheld, for the first time, the
so-called improvements on my new property. The habitable and comfortable
house was a species of pigsty, built out of the rough branches of trees,
without doors, windows, or roof. There was I to dwell, and that in a
season when the thermometer was ranging between ninety-five and a
hundred degrees. The very badness of things, however, stimulated us to
exertion; we set to work, and in two days had built a couple of very
decent huts, the only inconvenience of which was, that when it rained
hard, we were obliged to take refuge under a neighbouring cotton-tree.
Fortunately, out of the two thousand acres, there really were fifty in a
state of cultivation, and that helped us. I planted and kept house as
well as I could: in the daytime I ploughed and sowed; and in the evening
I mended the harness and the holes in my inexpressibles. With society I
was little troubled, seeing that my nearest neighbour lived
five-and-twenty miles off. The first summer passed in this manner; the
second was a little better; and the third better still--until at last
the way of life became endurable. There is nothing in the world
impracticable; and Napoleon never spoke a truer word than when he said,
"_Impossible!--C'est le mot d'un fou!_"

And then a hunting-party in the savannahs of Louisiana or Arkansas!

There is a something in those endless and gigantic wildernesses which
seems to elevate the soul, and to give to it, as well as to the body, an
increase of strength and energy. There reign, in countless multitudes,
the wild horse and the bison; the wolf, the bear, and the snake; and,
above all, the trapper, surpassing the very beasts of the desert in
wildness--not the old trapper described by Cooper, who never saw a
trapper in his life, but the real trapper, whose adventures and mode of
existence would furnish the richest materials for scores of romances.

Our American civilization has engendered certain corrupt off-shoots, of
which the civilization of other countries knows nothing, and which could
only spring up in a land where liberty is found in its greatest
development. These trappers are for the most part outcasts, criminals
who have fled from the chastisement of the law, or else unruly spirits
to whom even the rational degree of freedom enjoyed in the United States
has appeared cramping and insufficient. It is perhaps fortunate for the
States, that they possess the sort of