eemed to resign himself to its hardships,--indeed, sometimes he
consigned his negro body-servant, Caesar, to other duties than his
exclusive attendance. He had even been known to breakfast with his head
tied up in a handkerchief when some domestic crisis had supervened, such
as the escape of all the horses from the pinfold, to call away his
barber. As this functionary was of an active temperament and not at all
averse to the labor in the fields, he proved of more value thus utilized
than in merely furnishing covert amusement to the stationers by his
pompous duplication of his master's attitude of being too cultured,
traveled, and polished for his surroundings. He was a trained valet,
however, expert in all the details of dressing hair, powdering, curling,
pomatuming, and other intricacies of the toilet of a man of fashion of
that day. Caesar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of
buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the
cambric ruffles of shirts. As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his
wonderful experiences while in his master's service in London (although
he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with seeming
seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described the
life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen
the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of London
that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the
incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who
continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth
escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people,
had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond
measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those
sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War,
might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a venturesome
Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to afford any
interest in the present or glamour in the past.

It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the
Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several
minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the
attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders,
the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered
frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand