ing Nathan is, no doubt, an
idle and unfounded one, although some vague notions touching the
existence of just such a personage, whose habitat was referred to Western
Pennsylvania, used to prevail among the cotemporaries, or immediate
successors, of Boone and Kenton, M'Colloch and Wetzel. It is enough,
however, for the author to be sustained in such a matter by poetical
possibility; and he can afford to be indifferent to a charge which has
the scarce consistent merit of imputing to him, at one and the same time,
hostility towards the most warlike and the most peaceable of mankind.

NICK OF THE WOODS.

CHAPTER I.

The sun of an August afternoon, 1782, was yet blazing upon the rude
palisades and equally rude cabins of one of the principal stations in
Lincoln county, when a long train of emigrants, issuing from the
southern forest, wound its way over the clearings, and among the waving
maize-fields that surrounded the settlement, and approached the chief
gate of its enclosure.

The party was numerous, consisting perhaps of seven or eight score
individuals in all, men, women, and children, the last bearing that
proportion to the others in point of numbers usually found in a
borderer's family, and thus, with the help of pack-horses, cattle, and a
few negroes, the property of the more wealthy emigrants, scattered here
and there throughout the assemblage, giving to the whole train the
appearance of an army, or moving village, of Vandals in quest of some new
home to be won with the edge of the sword. Of the whole number there were
at least fifty well-armed; some of these, however, being striplings of
fourteen, and, in one or two instances, even of twelve, who balanced the
big rifle on their shoulders, or sustained it over their saddle-bows,
with all the gravity and dignity of grown warriors; while some few of
the negroes were provided with the same formidable weapons. In fact, the
dangers of the journey through the wilderness required that every
individual of a party should be well armed, who was at all capable of
bearing arms; and this was a kind of capacity which necessity instilled
into the American frontiersman in the earliest infancy.

Of this armed force, such as it was, the two principal divisions, all
well mounted, or at least provided with horses, which they rode or not
as the humour seized them, were distributed in military order on the
front and in the rear; while scouts, leading in the van, and fl