re were many loafers about. But burly Vandam appeared in
the nick of time to halt the small mob with the warning: "Don't you know
that's Mr. Van Cortlandt's guide?" With the governor and Vandam to back
him, Quonab soon had the mob on his side, and the dock loafer's own
friends pelted him with mud as he escaped. But not a little credit
is due to Skookum, for at the critical moment he had sprung on the
ruffian's bare and abundant leg with such toothsome effect that the
owner fell promptly backward and the knife thrust missed. It was quickly
over and Quonab replaced his knife, contemptuous of the whole crowd
before, during and after the incident. Not at the time, but days later,
he said of his foe: "He was a talker; he was full of fear."

With the backwoods only thirty miles away, and the unbroken wilderness
one hundred, it was hard to believe how little Henry van Cortlandt knew
of the woods and its life. He belonged to the ultra-fashionable set, and
it was rather their pose to affect ignorance of the savage world and
its ways. But he had plenty of common-sense to fan back on, and the
inspiring example of Washington, equally at home in the nation's
Parliament, the army intrenchment, the glittering ball room, or the
hunting lodge of the Indian, was a constant reminder that the perfect
man is a harmonious development of mind, morals, and physique.

His training had been somewhat warped by the ultraclassic fashion of
the times, so he persisted in seeing in Quonab a sort of discoloured,
barbaric clansman of Alaric or a camp follower of Xenophon's host,
rather than an actual living, interesting, native American, exemplifying
in the highest degree the sinewy, alert woodman, and the saturated
mystic and pantheist of an age bygone and out of date, combined with
a middle-measure intelligence. And Rolf, tall, blue-eyed with brown,
curling hair, was made to pose as the youthful Achilles, rather than
as a type of America's best young manhood, cleaner, saner, and of far
higher ideals and traditions than ever were ascribed to Achilles by his
most blinded worshippers. It recalled the case of Wordsworth and Southey
living side by side in England; Southey, the famous, must needs seek in
ancient India for material to write his twelve-volume romance that no
one ever looks at; Wordsworth, the unknown, wrote of the things of his
own time, about his own door? and produced immortal verse.

What should we think of Homer, had he sung his impressi