leaning on its barrel, like
one who recalled the scenes he had witnessed with melancholy pleasure.
"I have seen the waters of the two seas! On one of them was I born, and
raised to be a lad like yonder tumbling boy. America has grown, my
men, since the days of my youth, to be a country larger than I once
had thought the world itself to be. Near seventy years I dwelt in York,
province and state together:--you've been in York, 'tis like?"

"Not I--not I; I never visited the towns; but often have heard the place
you speak of named. 'Tis a wide clearing there, I reckon."

"Too wide! too wide! They scourge the very 'arth with their axes. Such
hills and hunting-grounds as I have seen stripped of the gifts of the
Lord, without remorse or shame! I tarried till the mouths of my hounds
were deafened by the blows of the chopper, and then I came west in
search of quiet. It was a grievous journey that I made; a grievous toil
to pass through falling timber and to breathe the thick air of smoky
clearings, week after week, as I did! 'Tis a far country too, that state
of York from this!"

"It lies ag'in the outer edge of old Kentuck, I reckon; though what the
distance may be I never knew."

"A gull would have to fan a thousand miles of air to find the eastern
sea. And yet it is no mighty reach to hunt across, when shade and game
are plenty! The time has been when I followed the deer in the mountains
of the Delaware and Hudson, and took the beaver on the streams of the
upper lakes in the same season, but my eye was quick and certain at that
day, and my limbs were like the legs of a moose! The dam of Hector,"
dropping his look kindly to the aged hound that crouched at his feet,
"was then a pup, and apt to open on the game the moment she struck the
scent. She gave me a deal of trouble, that slut, she did!"

"Your hound is old, stranger, and a rap on the head would prove a mercy
to the beast."

"The dog is like his master," returned the trapper, without appearing to
heed the brutal advice the other gave, "and will number his days, when
his work amongst the game is over, and not before. To my eye things
seem ordered to meet each other in this creation. 'Tis not the swiftest
running deer that always throws off the hounds, nor the biggest arm
that holds the truest rifle. Look around you, men; what will the Yankee
Choppers say, when they have cut their path from the eastern to the
western waters, and find that a hand, which can lay the 'a