ut a mile from the first
clearance, Jeffrey, the landlord of the inn at the village, has built a
small cottage for the refreshment of the traveller, and in it he intends
to place his son. In the mean time, until quite completed, for money is
scarce and things not to be done at railroad pace so near the North
Pole, he has located here an old well known black gentleman, called Mr.
Davenport, who was once better to do in the world, and kept a tavern
himself.

Having had the honour of his acquaintance for many years, I stopped to
see how my old friend was getting on, particularly as I heard that he
was now very old, and that his white consort had left him alone in the
narrow world of the house in the woods. He received me with grinning
delight, and told me that he had just left the new jail at Barrie for
selling liquor without a license, which, I opine, is rather hard law
against a poor old nigger, who had literally no other means of support,
and was most usefully stationed, like the monks of St. Bernard, in a
dangerous pass.

But the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, and the woolly head of old
Davenport had matter of satisfaction in it from a source that he never
dreamed of.

Alone--far away from the whole human world, in the depth of a hideous
forest, with a road nearly impassable one half of the year,--he found an
unexpected friend.

For fear of the visits of two-footed and four-footed brutes during the
long nights of his Robinson Crusoe solitude, old Davenport always shut
up his log castle early, and retired to rest as soon as daylight
departed; for it did so very early in the evening there, as the solemn
pines, with their gray trunks and far-spreading moss-grown arms and
dismal evergreen foliage, if it can be called foliage, stood close to
his dwelling--nay, brushed with the breath of the wind his very roof.

Recollect, reader, that this lonely dweller in the Bush resided near the
spot where the two soldier brothers perished; and you may imagine his
thoughts, after his castle was closed at night by the lone warder. No
one could come to his assistance, if he had the bugle that roused the
echoes of Fontarabia.

He had retired to rest early one night in the young spring-time, when he
heard a singular noise on the outside of his house, like somebody
moaning, and rubbing forcibly under his window, which was close to the
head of his pallet-bed. Quivering with fear, he lay, with these sounds
continuing at short inte