o
a town and buying small quantities at a time, so that suspicion might
not be awakened, until he secured enough to fill his portmanteau.

For bullets he melted down the leaden weights of windows, and when that
source of supply failed he melted pewter vessels and used pewter
bullets--a fact which gave rise to the belief that he used poisoned
balls. Finally, in a dyer's establishment, he had the good luck to find
two great leaden kettles, weighing more than seven hundred quintals,
which, he says, "I caused immediately to be carried into the magazines
with as much diligence and care as if they had been silver."

Chiefly by Cavalier's tireless energy and wonderful military skill, the
war was kept up against fearful odds for years, and finally the young
soldier succeeded in making a treaty of peace in which perfect liberty
of conscience and worship--which was all he had been fighting for--was
guaranteed to the Protestants of the Cevennes. His friends rejected this
treaty, however, and Cavalier soon afterwards went to Holland, where he
was given command of a regiment in the English service. His career in
arms was a brilliant one, so brilliant that the British made him a
general and governor of the island of Jersey; but he nowhere showed
greater genius or manifested higher soldierly qualities than during the
time when he was the Boy Commander of the Camisards.

THE CANOE FIGHT.

AN INCIDENT OF THE CREEK WAR.

The smallest naval battle ever fought in the world, perhaps, occurred on
the Alabama River on the 13th of November, 1813, between two canoes, and
this is the way in which it happened.

The United States were at war with Great Britain at that time, and a war
with Spain was also threatened. The British had stirred up the Indians
in the Northwest to make war upon the whites, and in 1813 they persuaded
the Creek Indians of Alabama and Mississippi to begin a war there.

The government troops were so busy with the British in other quarters of
the country that very little could be done for the protection of the
white settlers in the Southwest, and for a good while they had to take
care of themselves in the best way they could. Leaving their homes,
they gathered together here and there and built rude stockade forts, in
which they lived, with all their women and children. All the men,
including all the boys who were old enough to pull a trigger--and
frontier boys learn to use a gun very early in life--were organize