bass,--

"Charlie, Charlie, your mother wants yer. Why don't you come?"

After a while Sarah would be despatched to search for him, and her
girlish voice would repeat the parents' calls as she looked everywhere
in vain.

Then, when he returned to the house, to the accustomed inquiry, "Why,
where have you been? We've been calling you, and hunting everywhere
for you," he would reply, with the utmost nonchalance, "O, only out
here;" at which Sarah would retort, impatiently, "I know better than
that; for I hunted all round for you, and you wasn't anywhere to be
seen;" and Charlie respond, with compassionate condescension, "Pooh!
girls are great at hunting!"

Now, it was very wrong in Charlie to be so dumb when his parents
wanted him, and to cause them so much concern by his unexplained
absence; but he justified it to his own conscience on the ground that
it was in keeping with his character as second Crusoe. Robinson
Crusoe, in his estimation, was the greatest and most glorious man that
ever lived. Charlie had taken him for his model in life; and it would
derogate from the dignity of his position, while enacting the man
Crusoe,--"monarch of all he surveyed,"--to obey as the child Charlie.
He was willing, when in the house, to do what was expected of him, as
a boy under subjection; but when he was in his Crusoe cave, _alias_
the hollow tree, he was altogether another person; and he reasoned, in
order to have things in harmony, he must act accordingly.

Charlie, by some means, had come into possession of a horse pistol,
considerably out of order, it is true; but it served to fill the place
of one of the two pistols Robinson Crusoe found on board the Spanish
ship. He was in daily expectation of finding another; but needing
ammunition to store up against a coming fray with the cannibals on the
shore, he helped himself frequently to the contents of his father's
powder-horn and bullet-pouch.

"What under the canopy makes my powder go so fast?" his father often
exclaimed, as he replenished the mysteriously-wasting stock. The lad
also begged ammunition of the free-hearted settlers, and by these
means he laid up a surprisingly large amount of warlike munitions,
kept securely in an old skin bag. He had also dried venison stowed
away, and a good store of nuts, with pop-corn for parching, and
potatoes for roasting--all against some coming time of need.

Now, it chanced that Charlie's tree-cave turned to good account, as it
sav