oped the crisis. Still they consisted with
hope, and with that sentiment of good cheer and jovial courage which
succeeded the reading of the brief dispatch from Fort Prince George.

Advices just received from Charles Town. General Amherst detaches
Colonel Montgomery with adequate force to chastise Indians.

Discussions of the situation were rife everywhere. There was much talk
of the officer in command of the expedition, a man of distinguished
ability and tried courage, and the contradictory Gilmore and Whitson
found themselves in case to argue with great vivacity, offering large
wagers of untransferable commodities,--such as one's head, one's eyes,
one's life,--on the minor point, impossible to be settled at the moment,
as to whether or not he spelled his name with a final "y," one
maintaining this to be a fact, the other denying it, since he was a
younger brother (afterward succeeding to the title) of the Earl of
Eglinton, who always spelled his name Montgomerie. It might have
afforded them further subject for discussion, and enlarged their
appreciation of the caricature of incongruity, could they have known
that some two years later three of these savage Cherokee chiefs would be
presented to His Majesty King George in London by the Earl of Eglinton,
where they were said to have conducted themselves with great dignity and
propriety. Horace Walpole in one of his letters chronicles them as the
lions of the hour, dining with peers, and having a vocal celebrity, Mrs.
Clive, to sing on one of these occasions in her best style for their
pleasure. In fact, such was the grace of their deportment, that several
of the newspapers seemed to deduce therefrom the failure of
civilization, since the aboriginal state of man could show forth these
flowers of decorum, a point of view that offends to the quick a learned
historian, who argues astutely throughout a precious half-page of a
compendious work that the refinements of spiritual culture are still
worth consideration, seeming to imply that although we cannot all be
Cherokee chieftains, and take London by storm,--in a manner different,
let us say in passing, from their previous reduction of smaller
cities,--it is quite advisable for us to mind our curriculum and our
catechism, and be as wise and good as we may, if not distinguished.

Perhaps the Cherokees acted upon the intuitive perception of the value
of doing in Rome as the Romans do. And that rule of conduct seems
e