aracter. During a residence in the country from his eighth to
his twelfth year he was seized with a passion for natural history,
and bent all his energies to collecting eggs, insects, reptiles, and
birds, and to trapping squirrels and woodchucks, practising in the
meantime shooting in Indian fashion with bow and arrow. At twelve he
forsook natural history and found chemistry the only interest in life.
For four years longer he now secluded himself largely from family
life and youthful companions, while he experimented in his amateur
laboratory. Acids, gases, specific gravity, and chemical equations
were the only delight of his life, and he pursued his experiments with
all the ardor of the old seekers of the philosopher's stone. But at
sixteen the charms of chemistry faded, and he became again a haunter
of the woods, but was saved in the end from becoming a naturalist
by an equally strong passion for history, a passion so real that at
eighteen he had chosen his life-work, that of historian of the
French in the New World. With the idea of his work had also come the
conception of its magnitude, and he calmly looked forward to twenty
years of hard and exacting labor before realizing his hopes. Still,
mastered by the spirit of thoroughness, he spent all his vacations in
Canada, following in the footsteps of the early French settlers. Here
in the forest, he slept on the earth with no covering but a blanket,
exhausted his guides with long marches, and exposed his health by
stopping neither for heat nor rain. Fascinated by the visions of
forest life and with the pictures which the old stories called up,
Parkman entered upon the literary preparation for his work with zeal.
Indian history and ethnology were included in his college course,
while he spent many hours that should have been devoted to rest in
studying the great English masters of style. He was graduated at
twenty-one, and after a short trip to Europe started for the Western
plains to begin his historical studies from nature.

For months he and a college friend had followed the wanderings of a
portion of the Dacotahs in their journey across the Western prairies
to the Platte River, where they were to be joined by thousands of
others of their tribe, and take part in the extermination of the Snake
Indians, their bitter enemies. They had suffered from the heat and
the dust of the desert; they had hunted buffalo among the hills and
ravines of the Platte border, and had slep