d. But it is time to break your fasts; and if you
will follow me, brother Cap, I will show you how we poor soldiers live
here on a distant frontier."

CHAPTER IX.

Now, my co-mates and partners in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam.
_As You Like It._

Sergeant Dunham made no empty vaunt when he gave the promise conveyed
in the closing words of the last chapter. Notwithstanding the remote
frontier position of the post they who lived at it enjoyed a table that,
in many respects, kings and princes might have envied. At the Period of
our tale, and, indeed, for half a century later, the whole of that vast
region which has been called the West, or the new countries since the
war of the revolution, lay a comparatively unpeopled desert, teeming
with all the living productions of nature that properly belonged to the
climate, man and the domestic animals excepted. The few Indians
that roamed its forests then could produce no visible effects on the
abundance of the game; and the scattered garrisons, or occasional
hunters, that here and there were to be met with on that vast surface,
had no other influence than the bee on the buckwheat field, or the
humming-bird on the flower.

The marvels that have descended to our own times, in the way of
tradition, concerning the quantities of beasts, birds, and fishes
that were then to be met with, on the shores of the great lakes in
particular, are known to be sustained by the experience of living
men, else might we hesitate about relating them; but having been
eye-witnesses of some of these prodigies, our office shall be discharged
with the confidence that certainty can impart. Oswego was particularly
well placed to keep the larder of an epicure amply supplied. Fish of
various sorts abounded in its river, and the sportsman had only to cast
his line to haul in a bass or some other member of the finny tribe,
which then peopled the waters, as the air above the swamps of this
fruitful latitude are known to be filled with insects. Among others was
the salmon of the lakes, a variety of that well-known species, that is
scarcely inferior to the delicious salmon of northern Europe. Of the
different migratory birds that frequent forests and waters, there was
the same affluence, hundreds of acres of geese and ducks b