ctator of their proceedings.

The youth referred to was very unlike, in many respects, to what we are
accustomed to suppose a backwoods hunter should be. He did not possess
that quiet gravity and staid demeanour which often characterise these
men. True, he was tall and strongly made, but no one would have called
him stalwart, and his frame indicated grace and agility rather than
strength. But the point about him which rendered him different from his
companions was his bounding, irrepressible flow of spirits, strangely
coupled with an intense love of solitary wandering in the woods. None
seemed so well fitted for social enjoyment as he; none laughed so
heartily, or expressed such glee in his mischief-loving eye; yet for
days together he went off alone into the forest, and wandered where his
fancy led him, as grave and silent as an Indian warrior.

After all, there was nothing mysterious in this. The boy followed
implicitly the dictates of nature within him. He was amiable,
straightforward, sanguine, and intensely _earnest_. When he laughed he
let it out, as sailors have it, "with a will." When there was good
cause to be grave, no power on earth could make him smile. We have
called him boy, but in truth he was about that uncertain period of life
when a youth is said to be neither a man nor a boy. His face was
good-looking (_every_ earnest, candid face is) and masculine; his hair
was reddish-brown, and his eye bright blue. He was costumed in the
deerskin cap, leggings, moccasins, and leathern shirt common to the
western hunter.

"You seem tickled wi' the Injuns, Dick Varley," said a man who at that
moment issued from the block-house.

"That's just what I am, Joe Blunt," replied the youth, turning with a
broad grin to his companion.

"Have a care, lad; do not laugh at 'em too much. They soon take
offence; an' them Red-skins never forgive."

"But I'm only laughing at the baby," returned the youth, pointing to the
child, which, with a mixture of boldness and timidity, was playing with
a pup, wrinkling up its fat visage into a smile when its playmate rushed
away in sport, and opening wide its jet-black eyes in grave anxiety as
the pup returned at full gallop.

"It 'ud make an owl laugh," continued young Varley, "to see such a queer
pictur' o' itself."

He paused suddenly, and a dark frown covered his face as he saw the
Indian woman stoop quickly down, catch the pup by its hind-leg with one
hand, seize a h