, and the confused cries of a yelping multitude composed the
conflict itself. There was no want of room, no risk of narrow streets
and pavements, no deficiency of area in the formation of public squares.
The houses scattered around the traveller, dotting at long and
infrequent intervals the ragged wood which enveloped them, left few
stirring apprehensions of their firing one another. The forest, where
the land was not actually built upon, stood up in its primitive
simplicity undishonored by the axe.

Such was the condition of the settlement at the period when our hero so
unconsciously entered it. It was night, and the lamps of the village
were all in full blaze, illuminating with an effect the most picturesque
and attractive the fifty paces immediately encircling them. Each
dwelling boasted of this auxiliary and attraction; and in this
particular but few cities afford so abundantly the materials for a blaze
as our country villages. Three or four slight posts are erected at
convenient distances from each other in front of the building--a broad
scaffold, sufficiently large for the purpose, is placed upon them, on
which a thick coat of clay is plastered; at evening, a pile is built
upon this, of dry timber and the rich pine which overruns and mainly
marks the forests of the south. These piles, in a blaze, serve the
nightly strollers of the settlement as guides and beacons, and with
their aid Forrester safely wound his way into the little village of
Chestatee.

Forming a square in the very centre of the town, a cluster of four huge
fabrics, in some sort sustained the pretensions of the settlement to
this epithet. This ostentatious collection, some of the members of which
appeared placed there rather for show than service, consisted of the
courthouse, the jail, the tavern, and the shop of the blacksmith--the
two last-mentioned being at all times the very first in course of
erection, and the essential nucleus in the formation of the southern and
western settlement. The courthouse and the jail, standing directly
opposite each other, carried in their faces a family outline of
sympathetic and sober gravity. There had been some effect at pretension
in their construction, both being cumbrously large, awkward, and
unwieldy; and occupying, as they did, the only portion of the village
which had been stripped of its forest covering, bore an aspect of mutual
and ludicrous wildness and vacancy. They had both been built upon a like
pla