ighborhood. There is something very sweet and beautiful in it,
which, I am sure, you would not fail to discover.

"Philadelphia and Boston are more like the cities you know. They are
getting ambitious and are beginning to ape the manners of England but,
even there, you would, find most people like my own. The attempts at
grandeur are often ludicrous. In Philadelphia, I have seen men sitting
at public banquets without coat or collar and drinking out of bottles."

Next day, Jack and Solomon set out with packs and snow-shoes for The
Long House, which was the great highway of the Indians. It cut the
province from the Hudson to Lake Erie. In summer it was roofed by the
leaves of the forest. The chief villages of the Six Tribes were on or
near it. This trail was probably the ancient route of the cloven hoof
on its way to the prairies--the thoroughfare of the elk and the
buffalo. How wisely it was chosen time has shown, for now it is
covered with iron rails, the surveyors having tried in vain to find a
better one.

Late in the second day out, they came suddenly on a young moose. Jack
presented his piece and brought the animal down. They skinned him and
cut out the loins and a part of each hind quarter. When Solomon
wrapped the meat in a part of the hide and slung it over his shoulder,
night was falling.

"Cat's blood an' gunpowder! The ol' night has a sly foot," said
Solomon. "We won't see no Crow Hill tavern. We got t' make a snow
house."

On the south side of a steep hill near them was a deep, hard frozen
drift. Solomon cut the crust with his hatchet and began moving big
blocks of snow. Soon he had made a cavern in the great white pile, a
fathom deep and high, and as long as a full grown man. They put in a
floor of balsam boughs and spread their blankets on it. Then they cut
a small dead pine and built a fire a few feet in front of their house
and fried some bacon and a steak and made snow water and a pot of tea.
The steak and bacon were eaten on slices of bread without knife or
fork. Their repast over, Solomon made a rack and began jerking the
meat with a slow fire of green hardwood smoldering some three feet
below it. The "jerk" under way, they reclined on their blankets in
the snow house secure from the touch of a cold wind that swept down the
hillside, looking out at the dying firelight while Solomon told of his
adventures in the Ohio country.

Jack was a bit afflicted with "snow-shoe evil,"