hile we were still expecting attack,
Colonel Preston came over from the settlement in company with the
doctor, who wished to see his three patients once again, while the
former announced a visit from some of the chiefs to make peace with our
people, and to ask permission to trade.

That was the last alarm we had from the Indians, who would often come
afterwards to barter skins, and some of their basket-work, with venison
and fish, for knives and tobacco. And in the course of time my father
and I had them for guides in many a pleasant hunting expedition, and for
allies against the Spaniards, when they resumed their pretensions to the
country, and carried on a feeble, desultory warfare, which kept the
settlement always on the alert, but never once disturbed us, for our
home lay quite out of their track and beyond them, when they came up the
river upon one of their expeditions.

At such times my father always answered the call to arms; and as time
went on, in addition to Morgan and the black, he had two great strapping
fellows in Pomp and me--both young and loose-jointed, but able hands
with a firelock.

Such calls were exciting; but after two or three, so little damage was
done, that they ceased to cause us much anxiety; and after a bold
attempt or two at retaliation, in which the war was carried right into
the Spaniards' own land, and away up to their Floridan fort, matters
gradually settled down.

For our settlement had prospered and increased, the broad savannahs grew
year by year into highly-cultivated cotton land; the sugar-cane
nourished; coffee was grown; and as the plantations spread, the little
settlement gradually developed into a town and fort, to which big ships
came with merchandise from the old country, and took back the produce of
our fields. Then as the town increased, and the forest disappeared in
the course of years, we found ourselves in a position to laugh at the
pretensions of the Spaniards.

But over all that there seems to hang a mist, and I recall but little of
the troubles of those later days. It is of the early I write--of the
times when all was new and fresh; and I have only to close my eyes to
see again our old home surrounded by forest, that was always trying to
reclaim the portions my father had won; but the skirmishers of Nature
gained nothing, and a pleasant truce ensued. For my father was too
wealthy to need to turn his land into plantations and trouble himself
about the produce;