nd shelter to his
troops, he wrote a very polite letter urging the settlers to hold out if
practicable, relying on his succor with men, ammunition, and provisions;
but if compelled to give way, assuring the stationers of a welcome at
Fort Prince George.

The herders at the cow-pens on the Keowee had also determined to
reinforce Blue Lick Station, and with a number of the runaway horses of
the settlers, rounded up and driven in strings, several of them set
forth with the British soldiers from the fort. In this company Richard
Mivane and his grand daughter also took their way to Blue Lick Station
in lieu of waiting for a pack-train with provisions from Charlestown, as
they had anticipated.

It was a merry camping party as they fared along through the wilderness,
and she had occasion to make many sage observations on the inconsistency
and the unwisdom of man! That the prospect of killing some Frenchman, or
being themselves cruelly killed, in a national quarrel which neither
faction, the cow-drivers nor the Blue Lick Stationers, half understood,
should so endear men to each other was a sentiment into which she could
not enter. It was better, after all, to be a woman, she said to herself,
and sit soberly at home and sew the rational sampler, and let the world
wag on as it would and the cutthroats work their wild will on each
other. The least suggestion that brought the thought of the French to
their minds was received with eyes alight, and nerves aquiver, and blood
all in a rush. The favorite of the whole camp was a young fellow who had
achieved that enviable station by virtue of an inane yet inconceivably
droll intonation of the phrase, "Bong chure" _(Bon jour_), delivered at
all manner of unconformable times and in inappropriate connections, and
invariably greeted with shouts of laughter. And when at last the party
reached the vicinity of Blue Lick and the stationers swarmed out to meet
them, taking the news of the French invasion at second hand, each
repeating it to the other, and variously recounting it back again, never
dreaming that it was supposed to have originally issued from the
station, she meditated much upon this temperamental savagery in man, and
the difficulty it occasioned in conforming him to those sagacious
schemes for his benefit which she nourished in her inventive little
pate. The antagonisms of the Blue Lick Stationers and the cow-drivers
from the Keowee vanished like mist. On the one hand the statione