ame exhausted and unable to proceed. They could not
carry him, and would not have him to die of starvation in the
wilderness. They could not halt with him, lest the same fate should
overtake them, which had defeated the enterprise of Brady. But one
alternative remained, and though, to us, it appears cruel and inhuman,
it was self-preservation to them, and mercy, in a strange guise, to the
unhappy victim--_he was despatched by the hand of the leader_, and
buried upon the prairie! His grave is somewhere near the head-waters of
the Wabash, and has probably been visited by no man from that day to
this!

Mournful reflections cluster round such a narrative as this, and we are
impelled to use the word "atrocious" when we speak of it. It was
certainly a bloody deed, but the men of those days were not nurtured in
drawing-rooms, and never slept upon down-beds. A state of war, moreover,
begets many evils, and none of them are more to be deplored than the
occasional occurrence of such terrible necessities.

The ranger-character, like the pioneer-nature of which it was a phase,
was compounded of various and widely-differing elements. No one of his
evil qualities was more prominent than several of the good; and, I am
sorry to say, none of the good was more prominent than several of the
bad. No class of men did more efficient service in defending the western
settlements from the inroads of the Indians; and though it seems hard
that the war should sometimes have been carried into the country of the
untutored savage by civilized men, with a severity exceeding his own, we
should remember that we can not justly estimate the motives and feelings
of the ranger, without first having been exasperated by his sufferings
and tried by his temptations.

V.

THE REGULATOR.

"Thieves for their robbery have authority,
When judges steal themselves."--

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

At the conclusion of peace between England and America, in eighteen
hundred and fifteen, the Indians, who had been instigated and supported
in their hostility by the British, suddenly found themselves deprived of
their allies. If they now made war upon the Americans, they must do so
upon their own responsibility, and, excepting the encouragement of a few
traders and commanders of outposts, whose enmity survived the general
pacification, without assistance from abroad. They, however, refused to
lay down their arms, and hostilities were continued, though