length.

"In what way awkward?" I asked in some surprise. "How can _that_
signify?"

"A great deal. These squatters are queer fellows--_ugly_ customers to
deal with--especially when you come to turn them out of their house and
home, as they consider it. It is true, they have the _pre-emption
right_--that is, they may purchase, if they please, and send you to seek
a location elsewhere; but this is a privilege those gentry rarely please
to indulge in--being universally too poor to purchase."

"What then?"

"Their motto is, for `him to keep who can.' The old adage, `possession
being nine points of the law,' is, in the squatter's code, no
dead-letter, I can assure you."

"Do you mean, that the fellow might refuse to turn out?"

"It depends a good deal on what sort of a fellow he is. They are not
all alike. If he should chance to be one of the obstinate and
pugnacious kind, you are likely enough to have trouble with him."

"But surely the law--"

"Will aid you in ousting him--that's what you were going to say?"

"I should expect so--in Tennessee, at all events."

"And you would be disappointed. In almost any other part of the state,
you _might_ rely upon legal assistance; but, I fear, that about
Swampville you will find society not very different from that you have
encountered on the borders of Texas; and you know how little help the
law could afford you _there_, in the enforcement of such a claim?"

"Then I must take the law into my own hands," rejoined I, falling into
very old-fashioned phraseology--for I was beginning to feel indignant at
the very idea of this prospective difficulty. "No, Warfield," replied
my sober friend, "do not take that course; I know you are not the man to
be _scared_ out of your rights; but, in the present case, prudence is
the proper course to follow.--Your squatter, if there be one--it is to
be hoped that, like many of our grand cities, he has only an existence
on the map--but if there should be a real live animal of this
description on the ground, he will be almost certain to have
neighbours--some half-dozen of his own kidney--living at greater or less
distances around him. They are not usually of a clannish disposition;
but, in a matter of this kind, they will be as unanimous in their
sympathies, and antipathies too, as they would about the butchering of a
bear. Turn one of them out by force--either legal or otherwise--and it
would be like bringing a hornets' nest about