n bloody encounters. These conflicts were so frequent and so
sanguinary, that this realm so highly favored of God for the promotion
of all happiness, subsequently received the appropriate name of "The
dark and bloody ground."

After an absence of many months, Finley and his companions returned to
North Carolina, with the most glowing accounts of the new country which
they had found. Their story of the beauty of those realms was so
extravagant, that many regarded them as gross exaggerations. It
subsequently appeared, however, that they were essentially true. A more
lovely and attractive region cannot be found on earth. It is man's
inhumanity to man, mainly, which has ever caused such countless millions
to mourn.

Daniel Boone listened eagerly to the recital of John Finley and his
associates. The story they told added fuel to the flame of emigration,
which was already consuming him. He talked more and more earnestly of
his desire to cross the mountains. We know not what were the emotions
with which his wife was agitated, in view of her husband's increasing
desire for another plunge into the wilderness. We simply know that
through her whole career, she manifested the most tender solicitude to
accommodate herself to the wishes of her beloved husband. Indeed he was
a man peculiarly calculated to win a noble woman's love. Gentle in his
demeanor, and in all his utterances, mild and affectionate in his
intercourse with his family, he seemed quite unconscious of the heroism
he manifested in those achievements, which gave him ever increasing
renown.

Life in the cabin of the frontiersman, where the wants are few, and the
supplies abundant, is comparatively a leisure life. These men knew but
little of the hurry and the bustle with which those in the crowded city
engage daily in the almost deadly struggle for bread. There was no want
in the cabin of Daniel Boone. As these two hardy adventurers, John
Finley and Daniel Boone, sat together hour after hour by the fire,
talking of the new country which Finley had explored, the hearts of both
burned within them again to penetrate those remote realms. To them there
were no hardships in the journey. At the close of each day's march,
which but slightly wearied their toughened sinews, they could in a few
moments throw up a shelter, beneath which they would enjoy more
luxurious sleep than the traveler, after being rocked in the rail-cars,
can now find on the softest couches of our metropol