naturally as a duck takes to
water. I do not know how the discovery that they were probably making
for Gabe Case's and his bottle of champagne, which always awaited the
first sleigh on the road, would have struck me in those days. Most
likely as a grievous disappointment; for my fancy, busy ever with
Uncas and Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo, had certainly a buffalo hunt,
or an ambush, or, at the very least, a big fire, ready at the end of
the road. But such is life. Its most cherished hopes have to be
surrendered one by one to the prosy facts of every-day existence. I
recall distinctly how it cut me to the heart when I first walked up
Broadway, with an immense navy pistol strapped around my waist, to
find it a paved street, actually paved, with no buffaloes in sight and
not a red man or a beaver hut.

However, life has its compensations also. At fifty I am as willing to
surrender the arctic circle as I was hopeful of it at ten, with the
price of coal in the chronic plight of my little boy when he has a
troublesome hitch in his trousers: "O dear me! my pants hang up and
don't hang down." And Gabe Case's is a most welcome exchange to me for
the ambush, since I have left out the pistol and the rest of the
armament. I listen to the stories of the oldest inhabitant, of the
winters when "the snow lay to the second-story windows in the Bowery,"
with the fervent wish that they may never come back, and secretly
gloat over his wail that the seasons have changed and are not what
they were. The man who exuberantly proclaims that New York is getting
to have the finest winter-resort climate in the world is my friend,
and I do not care if I never see another snowball. Alas, yes! though
Deerslayer and I are still on the old terms, I fear the evidence is
that I am growing old.

In the midst of the rejoicing comes old Boreas, as last winter, for
instance, and blows down my house of cards. Just when we thought
ourselves safe in referring to the great blizzard as a monstrous,
unheard-of thing, and were dwelling securely in the memory of how we
gathered violets in the woods out in Queens and killed mosquitoes in
the house in Christmas week, comes grim winter and locks the rivers
and buries us up to the neck in snow, before the Thanksgiving dinner
is cold. Then the seasons when Gabe's much-coveted bottle stood
unclaimed on the shelf in its bravery of fine ribbons till far into
the New Year, and was won then literally "by a scratch" on a ro