diers began moving their single cannon, a six-pounder, from one
blockhouse to another. All the men jumped up to help, as at the raising
of a home, and put themselves in the way so ardently that they had to be
ordered back.

When everybody but ourselves had left the starlit open place, Johnny
Appleseed lay down and stretched his heels to the blaze. A soldier added
another log, and kicked into the flame those fallen away. Though it was
the end of July, Lake Erie cooled the inland forests.

Sentinels were posted in the blockhouses. Quiet settled on the camp; and
I sat turning many things in my mind besides the impending battle.
Napoleon Bonaparte had made a disastrous campaign in Russia. If I were
yet in France; if the Marquis du Plessy had lived; if I had not gone to
Mittau; if the self I might have been, that always haunts us, stood
ready to take advantage of the turn--

Yet the thing which cannot be understood by men reared under old
governments had befallen me. I must have drawn the wilderness into my
blood. Its possibilities held me. If I had stayed in France at twenty, I
should have been a Frenchman. The following years made me an American.
The passion that binds you to a land is no more to be explained than the
fact that many women are beautiful, while only one is vitally
interesting.

The wilderness mystic was sitting up looking at me.

"I see two people in you," he said.

"Only two?"

"Two separate men."

"What are their names?"

"Their names I cannot see."

"Well, suppose we call them Louis and Lazarre."

His eyes sparkled.

"You are a white man," he pronounced. "By that I mean you are not
stained with many vile sins."

"I hadn't an equal chance with other men. I lost nine years."

"Mebby," hazarded Johnny Appleseed cautiously, "you are the one
appointed to open and read what is sealed."

"If you mean to interpret what you read, I'm afraid I am not the one.
Where did you get those leaves?"

"From a book that I divided up to distribute among the people."

"Doesn't that destroy the sense?"

"No. I carry the pages in their order from cabin to cabin."

He came around the fire with the lightness of an Indian, and gave me his
own fragment to examine. It proved to be from the writings of one
Emanuel Swedenborg.

With a smile which seemed to lessen the size of his face and concentrate
its expression to a shining point, Johnny Appleseed slid his leather
bags along the rope girdle, and searched t