hickory poles, set in a
double row and bound together by lengths of copper wire. It was to be
further observed that the timbers had been stripped of their bark and
the knots smoothed down so as to afford no coigne of vantage to even a
naked foot. Add, again, that the poles had been charred and sharpened at
the top, and it will be understood that the barrier was a formidable one
against any assault short of artillery.

There was no beaten road or path near the line of palisades, but,
following the curving of the shore, a forest track, already green with
the young grass that was pushing its way through last year's stubble,
stretched away to the north and south. It was hardly more than a runway
for the deer and wild cattle, but it did not give one the impression of
having been originally plotted out by these creatures, after the
immemorial fashion of their kind. An animal does not lay out his road in
sections of perfectly straight lines connected by mathematical curves,
neither does he fill up gullies nor cut through hills, when it is so
easy to go around these obstructions.

The boy, who sat and dreamed at the water's edge, was in his eighteenth
year or thereabouts, slenderly proportioned, and with well-cut features.
The delicately moulded chin, the sensitive nostril--these are the signs
of the poet, the dreamer, rather than of the man of action. And yet the
face was not altogether deficient in indications of strength. That heavy
line of eyebrow should mean something, as also the free up-fling of the
head when he sat erect; the final impression was of immaturity of
character rather than of the lack of it. From the merely superficial
stand-point, it may be added that he had brown eyes and hair (the latter
being cut square across his forehead and falling to his shoulders), a
good mouth containing the whitest of teeth, and a naturally light
complexion that was already beginning to accumulate its summer's coat of
tan.

He was dressed in a tunic or smock of brown linen, gathered at the waist
by a belt of greenish leather, with a buckle that shone like gold. His
knees were bare, but around his legs were wound spiral bands of
soft-dressed deer-hide. Buskins, secured by thongs of red leather and
soled with moose-hide, to prevent slipping, covered his feet, while his
head-dress consisted of a simple band of thin gold, worn fillet-wise.
This last, being purely ornamental, was doubtless a token of gentle
birth or of an assured s