o hear of brilliant
passages of arms, where, however unimportant the consequences, the
display of soldiership and bravery was of the highest order. In such
encounters, or frays they might almost be called, from the smallness of
the numbers concerned and the hand-to-hand mode of fighting which they
exhibited, Marion, Sumpter, Horry, Pickens, and many others, had won a
fame that in a nation of poetical or legendary associations would have
been reduplicated through a thousand channels of immortal verse: but,
alas! we have no ballads: and many men, who as well deserve to be
remembered as Percy or Douglas, as Adam Bell or Clym of the Clough, have
sunk down without even a couplet-epitaph upon the rude stone, that in
some unfenced and unreverenced grave-yard still marks the lap of earth
whereon their heads were laid.

One feature that belonged to this unhappy state of things in Carolina
was the division of families. Kindred were arrayed against each other in
deadly feuds, and, not unfrequently, brother took up arms against
brother, and sons against their sires. A prevailing spirit of treachery
and distrust marked the times. Strangers did not know how far they might
trust to the rites of hospitality; and many a man laid his head upon his
pillow, uncertain whether his fellow lodger, or he with whom he had
broken bread at his last meal, might not invade him in the secret
watches of the night and murder him in his slumbers. All went armed, and
many slept with pistols or daggers under their pillows. There are tales
told of men being summoned to their doors or windows at midnight by the
blaze of their farm-yards to which the incendiary torch had been
applied, and shot down, in the light of the conflagration, by a
concealed hand. Families were obliged to betake themselves to the
shelter of the thickets and swamps, when their own homesteads were
dangerous places. The enemy wore no colors, and was not to be
distinguished from friends either by outward guise or speech. Nothing
could be more revolting than to see the symbols of peace thus misleading
the confident into the toils of war; nor is it possible to imagine a
state of society characterized by a more frightful insecurity.

Such was the condition of the country to which my tale now makes it
necessary to introduce my reader. Butler's instructions required that
he should report himself to General Gates, and, unless detained for more
pressing duty, to proceed with all the circumspect