on again beholding
them is to be mingled with grief. When we last saw them they had a
father, but no mother. Now they have neither one nor the other. The old
Colonel, their father--the French _emigre_, the _hunter naturalist_--is
dead. He who had taught them all he knew; who had taught them to ride,
to swim, to dive deep rivers, to fling the lasso, to climb tall trees,
and scale steep cliffs, to bring down birds upon the wing or beasts upon
the run, with the arrow and the unerring rifle; who had trained them to
sleep in the open air, in the dark forest, on the unsheltered prairie,
along the white snow-wreath--anywhere--with but a blanket or a buffalo
robe for their bed; who had taught them to live on the simplest food,
and had imparted to one of them a knowledge of science, of botany in
particular, that enabled them, in case of need, to draw sustenance, from
plants and trees, from roots and fruits, to find resources where
ignorant men would starve.

He also had taught them to kindle a fire without flint, steel, or
detonating powder; to discover their direction without a compass, from
the rocks and the trees and the signs of the heavens; and in addition to
all, had taught them, as far as was then known, the geography of that
vast wilderness that stretches from the Mississippi to the shores of the
Pacific Ocean, and northward to the icy borders of the Arctic Sea--he
who had taught them all this, their father, was no more; and his three
sons, the "boy men," of whom he was so proud, and of whose
accomplishments he was wont to boast, were now orphans upon the wide
world.

But little more than a year after their return from their grand
expedition to the Texan prairies, the "old Colonel" had died. It was one
of the worst years of that scourge of the South--the yellow fever--and
to this dread pestilence he had fallen a victim.

Hugot, the _ex-chasseur_ and attached domestic, who was accustomed to
follow his master like a shadow, had also followed him into the next
world. It was not grief that killed Hugot, though he bore the loss of
his kind master sadly enough. But it was not grief that killed Hugot. He
was laid low by the same disease of which his master had died--the
yellow fever. A week had scarcely passed after the death of the latter,
before Hugot caught the disease, and in a few days he was carried to the
tomb and laid by the side of his "old Colonel."

The Boy Hunters--Basil, Lucien, Francois--became orphans. They