nt, however, having been married but a year, his family was
small. For, since reaching the stature and years of manhood, Bushrod
Reynolds had spent many years in the great North-west, where as an
Indian-trader he had pushed his fortunes with great energy and success,
yet with clean hands, never in all the time selling or bartering a
single gallon of whisky to the Indians--a virtue quite rare, we fear, in
Indian-traders, and one for which he was highly commended by Tecumseh
himself, who never drank any thing but water. The address, prudence, and
integrity he displayed in this vocation had attracted the notice of
General Harrison, then Governor of the North-west Territory, through
whose influence the young Kentuckian received the appointment of United
States Indian Agent in that quarter. Here again he had acquitted himself
in the same clean-handed manner, never touching a dollar of the money
intrusted to him, saving so far as officially authorized.

And there, conspicuous among the camp-followers, with a fund of good
humor and laughter rich enough to keep the whole rear of the army in
spirits, even when cut down to short rations and pushed to long
marches--there, gigantic as life and shaggy with bear-skin from top to
toe, was our old friend Big Black Burl--Cap'n Rennuls, the Fighting
Nigger, the Big Black Brave with a Bushy Head, Mish-mugwa--whom we left
twenty-four years ago in the Paradise, treading with unmoccasined feet
the peace-path, and filling the resounding woods from morning till night
with the echoes of his peace-songs. Yes, as gigantic as life, and still
as jolly as gigantic, with never a regret in all these years of servile
toil that he had sewed it up in his bear-skin cap instead of accepting
at once the priceless blessing which his good mistress, in the
unspeakable gratitude of her mother's heart, had bidden him to take as
his forever.

Time and the world had evidently dealt kindly by our hero, the ebony
smoothness of his wide-snouted mug unfurrowed as yet by those lines of
care and thought we so often find disfiguring the faces of Shem and
Japheth, nor grizzled yet his fleecy locks, although he had left his
fiftieth year behind him--an age when the heads of most men begin to
whiten under the snows of life's winter. For all that, though they may
not have brought him wrinkles and whitened his locks, the passing years
had brought him wisdom and whitened the color of his thoughts, once so
crimson. In proof wh