ders of my Journal, if so I may venture to call it, would
like to know how Clarice and I came to be at Uncle Jeff's farm. To do
so, I must give a little bit of my family history, which probably would
not otherwise interest them.

My father, Captain Middlemore, had been an officer in the English army,
but sold out and came to America. Being, I suspect, of a roving
disposition, he had travelled through most of the Eastern States without
finding any spot where he could make up his mind to settle. At length
he bent his steps to Ohio; in the western part of which he had one night
to seek shelter from a storm at the farm of a substantial settler, a Mr.
Ralph Crockett (the father of Uncle Jeff). Mr. Crockett treated the
English stranger with a hospitality which the farmers of Ohio never
failed to show to their guests. He had several sons, but he spoke of one
who seemed to have a warm place in his heart, 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