d, hitherto unsoiled, the refuse cast off by the
older colonies. I must add quickly that we got more than our share of
their best stock along with this.

No sooner had the sun begun to pit the snow hillocks than wild creatures
came in from the mountains, haggard with hunger and hardship. They had
left their homes in Virginia and the Carolinas in the autumn; an
unheralded winter of Arctic fierceness had caught them in its grip.
Bitter tales they told of wives and children buried among the rocks.
Fast on the heels of these wretched ones trooped the spring settlers in
droves; and I have seen whole churches march singing into the forts, the
preacher leading, and thanking God loudly that He had delivered them from
the wilderness and the savage. The little forts would not hold them; and
they went out to hew clearings from the forest, and to build cabins and
stockades. And our own people, starved and snowbound, went out
likewise,--Tom and Polly Ann and their little family and myself to the
farm at the river-side. And while the water flowed between the stumps
over the black land, we planted and ploughed and prayed, always alert,
watching north and south, against the coming of the Indians.

But Tom was no husbandman. He and his kind were the scouts, the advance
guard of civilization, not tillers of the soil or lovers of close
communities. Farther and farther they went afield for game, and always
they grumbled sorely against this horde which had driven the deer from
his cover and the buffalo from his wallow.

Looking back, I can recall one evening when the long summer twilight
lingered to a close. Tom was lounging lazily against the big persimmon
tree, smoking his pipe, the two children digging at the roots, and Polly
Ann, seated on the door-log, sewing. As I drew near, she looked up at me
from her work. She was a woman upon whose eternal freshness industry
made no mar.

"Davy," she exclaimed, "how ye've growed! I thought ye'd be a wizened
little body, but this year ye've shot up like a cornstalk."

"My father was six feet two inches in his moccasins," I said.

"He'll be wallopin' me soon," said Tom, with a grin. He took a long
whiff at his pipe, and added thoughtfully, "I reckon this ain't no place
fer me now, with all the settler folks and land-grabbers comin' through
the Gap."

"Tom," said I, "there's a bit of a fall on the river here."

"Ay," he said, "and nary a fish left."

"Something better," I answered; "we'll p