enough to feed twenty men, but which he felt
compelled to abandon from satiety; "cut in nigher to the heart, as the
old man says, and you will find the riches of the piece."

"The heart!" exclaimed the Doctor, inwardly delighted to learn there was
a distinct organ to be submitted to his inspection. "Ay, let me see the
heart--it will at once determine the character of the animal--certes
this is not the cor--ay, sure enough it is--the animal must be of the
order belluae, from its obese habits!"

He was interrupted by a long and hearty, but still a noiseless fit of
merriment, from the trapper, which was considered so ill-timed by the
offended naturalist, as to produce an instant cessation of speech, if
not a stagnation of ideas.

"Listen to his beasts' habits and belly orders," said the old man,
delighted with the evident embarrassment of his rival; "and then he says
it is not the core! Why, man, you are farther from the truth than you
are from the settlements, with all your bookish laming and hard words;
which I have, once for all, said cannot be understood by any tribe or
nation east of the Rocky Mountains. Beastly habits or no beastly habits,
the creatur's are to be seen cropping the prairies by tens of thousands,
and the piece in your hand is the core of as juicy a buffaloe-hump as
stomach need crave!"

"My aged companion," said Obed, struggling to keep down a rising
irascibility, that he conceived would ill comport with the dignity
of his character, "your system is erroneous, from the premises to the
conclusion; and your classification so faulty, as utterly to confound
the distinctions of science. The buffaloe is not gifted with a hump at
all; nor is his flesh savoury and wholesome, as I must acknowledge it
would seem the subject before us may well be characterised--"

"There I'm dead against you, and clearly with the trapper," interrupted
Paul Hover. "The man who denies that buffaloe beef is good, should scorn
to eat it!"[*]

[*] It is scarcely necessary to tell the reader, that the animal so
often alluded to in this book, and which is vulgarly called the
buffaloe, is in truth the bison; hence so many contretemps
between the men of the prairies and the men of science.

The Doctor, whose observation of the bee-hunter had hitherto been
exceedingly cursory, stared at the new speaker with a look which denoted
something like recognition.

"The principal characteristics of your countenance, friend,