petrified
tree, and everywhere a little travelled land. I explored it with
Goshorn, riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the
signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but on the other
hand could "shoot their mark" with a rifle to perfection, and who would
assuredly have placed such signature on me had I not been a holy
messenger of _Ile_, and an angel of coming moneyed times.

One day we stopped at a farm-house in a wild, lonely place. There was
only an old woman there--one of the stern, resolute, hard-muscled
frontier women, the daughters of mothers who had fought "Injuns"--and a
calf. And thereby hung a tale, which the three men with me fully
authenticated.

The whole country thereabouts had been for four years so worried,
harried, raided, raked, plundered, and foraged by Federals and
Confederates--one day the former, the next the latter; blue and grey, or
sky and sea--that the old lady had nothing left to live on. Hens, cows,
horses, corn, all had gone save one calf, the Benjamin and idol of her
heart.

One night she heard a piteous baaing, and, seizing a broom, rushed to the
now henless hen-house, in which she kept the calf, to find in it a full-
grown panther attacking her pet. By this time the old lady had grown
desperate, and seizing the broom, she proceeded to "lam" the wild beast
with the handle, and with all her heart; and the fiend of ferocity,
appalled at her attack, fled. I saw the calf with the marks of the
panther's claws, not yet quite healed; I saw the broom; and, lastly, I
saw the old woman, the mother in Ishmael; whose face was a perfect
guarantee of the truth of the story. One of us suggested that the old
lady should have the calf's hide tanned and wear it as a trophy, like an
Indian, which would have been a strange reversal of Shakespeare's
application of it, or to

"Hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs."

Then there came the great spring freshet in Elk River, which rose
unusually high, fifty feet above its summer level. It had come to within
an inch or two of my floor, and yet I went to bed and to sleep. By a
miracle it rose no more, for I had a distinct conviction it would not,
which greatly amazed everybody. But many were drowned all about us. The
next day a man who professed bone-setting and doctoring, albeit not
diplomaed, asked me to go with him and act as interpreter to a German
patient who had a broken thigh. While felling a tree