industry and art,
would yield sustenance to millions of men. But whether, on the other
hand, the encroaching spirit of the inhabitants of the United States,
that restless, rambling propensity which has driven their settlers
southwards into Mexico, and westward to the Pacific, should be indulged
to the extent of exterminating and dispossessing the original owners of
the territory before the new occupants have real need of it, is a
question admitting of more discussion than we shall here enter upon.

We have already said so much about the author now referred to,
concerning the general scope of his talent, the many beauties and
occasional defects of his writings, that any further preamble would be
superfluous, and we will at once proceed to give specimens of his book.

Upon the road connecting the town of Coosa with Milledgeville, the
capital of Georgia, and near to the spot where, at the present day, a
convenient hotel invites the traveller to repose and refreshment, there
stood, towards the close of the last century, beneath a projecting rock,
crowned with a few red cedars and pine-trees, a rudely constructed, but
roomy block-house. In front of the building, and between two massive
perpendicular beams, connected by cross-bars, swung a large board, upon
which was to be distinguished a grotesque figure, painted in gaudy
colours, and whose diadem of feathers, tomahawk, scalping-knife, and
wampum, denoted the Indian chief. Beneath this sign a row of
hieroglyphical-looking characters informed the passer-by that he could
here find "Entertainment for man and beast." On that side of the house,
or rather hut, next to the road, was a row of wooden sheds, separated
from the path by a muddy ditch, and partly filled with hay and straw.
These cribs might have been supposed the habitations of the cows, had
not some dirty bedding, that protruded from them, denoted them to be the
sleeping apartments of those travellers whose evil star compelled them
to pass the night at the sign of the Indian King. A stable and pig-sty
completed the appurtenances of this backwood dwelling.

It as a stormy December night; the wind howled fiercely through the
gloomy pine-forest, on the skirt of which the block-house stood, and the
rapidly-succeeding crashes of the huge trees, as, with a report like
thunder, the storm bore them to the ground, proclaimed the violence of
one of those tornados that so frequently rage between the Blue Mountains
of Tennessee a