and ash, in which the elk and the red deer made their haunts, and the
black bear, whose flesh the hunter held to be delicious beyond rivalry,
fattened on the abundant crop of acorns and chestnuts. In the trees and
on the grasses were quail, turkeys, and pigeons numberless, while the
golden eagle built its nest on the mountain-peaks and swooped in circles
over the forest land. Where the thickets of spruce and rhododendron
threw their cooling shade upon the swift streams, the brook trout was
abundant, plenty and promise were everywhere, and, aside from the peril
of the prowling savage, the land was a paradise.

It was not in Kentucky, where Boone then dwelt alone, but in Tennessee
that the fugitive Regulators sought a realm of safety. James Robertson,
one of their number, had already sought the land beyond the hills and
was cultivating his fields of maize on the Watauga's fertile banks. He
was to become one of the leading men in later Tennessee. Hither the
Regulators, fleeing from their persecutors, followed him, and in 1772
founded a republic in the wilderness by a written compact, Robertson
being chosen one of their earliest magistrates. Thus, still defiant of
persecution, they "set to the people of America the dangerous example of
erecting themselves into a separate state, distinct from and independent
of the authority of the British king."

Thus we owe to the Regulators of North Carolina the first decided step
in the great struggle for independence so soon to come. And to North
Carolina we must give the credit of making the earliest declaration of
independence. More than a year before Jefferson's famous Declaration the
people of Mecklenburg County passed a series of resolutions in which
they declared themselves free from allegiance to the British crown. This
was in May, 1775. On April 12, 1776, North Carolina authorized her
delegates in the Continental Congress to declare for independence. Thus
again the Old North State was the first to set her seal for liberty. The
old Regulators had not all left her soil, and we seem to hear in these
resolutions an echo of the guns which were fired on the Alamance in the
first stroke of the colonists of America for freedom from tyranny.

_LORD DUNMORE AND THE GUNPOWDER._

In the city of Williamsburg, the old capital of Virginia, there still
stands a curious old powder magazine, built nearly two centuries ago by
Governor Spotswood, the hero of the "Golden Horseshoe" adven