itish government, had but come in the previous day, and he had still
the pulses of civilization beating in his veins.

For this reason, perhaps, as he sat, one elbow on his knee, his chin in
his hand, his sharp, commercially keen face softened by a thought not
akin to trade, his eyes were darkened, while he gazed at one of the
contestants, with a doubt that had little connection with the odds which
he had offered. He was troubled by a vague regret, a speculation of
restless futility, for it concerned a future so unusual that no detail
could be predicted from the resources of the present. And yet this
sentiment was without the poignancy of personal grief--it was only a
vicarious interest that animated him. For himself, despite the
flattering, smooth reminiscence of the camlet-cloth yet lingering in the
nerves of his finger-tips, the recent relapse into English speech, the
interval spent once more among the stir of streets and shops, splendid
indeed to an unwonted gaze, the commercial validities, which he so
heartily appreciated, of the warehouses, and crowded wharves, and laden
merchantmen swinging at anchor in the great harbor, he was satisfied. He
was possessed by that extraordinary renunciation of civilization which
now and again was manifested by white men thrown among the Cherokee
tribe--sometimes, as in his instance, a trader, advanced in years, "his
pile made," to use the phrase of to-day, the world before him where to
choose a home; sometimes a deserter from the British or French military
forces, according to the faction which the shifting Cherokees affected
at the time; more than once a captive, spared for some whim, set at
liberty, free to go where he would--all deliberately and of choice cast
their lot among the Cherokees; lived and died with the treacherous race.
Whether the wild sylvan life had some peculiarly irresistible
attraction; whether the world beyond held for them responsibilities and
laborious vocations and irksome ties which they would fain evade;
whether they fell under the bewitchment of "Herbert's Spring," named
from an early commissioner of Indian affairs, after drinking whereof one
could not quit the region of the Great Smoky Mountains, but remained in
that enchanted country for seven years, fascinated, lapsed in perfect
content--it is impossible to say. There is a tradition that when the
attraction of the world would begin to reassert its subtle reminiscent
forces, these renegades of civiliza