dy woman worked here, making fine butter and
cheese, while Daniel kept guard over the cattle, letting them wander
over the hills and through the woods as they would, but driving them
back to their pen near the cabin at sunset.

This duty of herdsman left Daniel much time to himself. He spent this
time in studying woodcraft. He grew passionately fond of everything
belonging to the wilderness; he knew birds and beasts, the trails
through the forest and the course of streams as well as any Indian. He
set traps of his own making, and brought his captures proudly home at
night to his mother.

At first he had to make his own weapons, and invented a curious
implement, simply a slim, smooth-shaved sapling, with a bunch of twisted
roots at the end. This he learned to throw so skilfully that he could
readily kill birds, rabbits, and small game with it. A little later,
however, his father gave him a rifle, and he became an expert marksman,
able to provide his mother with plenty of game for food.

It was a wonderful life for a boy who loved the country. All summer he
herded the cattle and roamed through the almost untrodden wilderness. In
the winter his father let him hunt as soon as he had learned to handle a
gun. Daniel roamed far and wide across the Neversink mountain range to
the north and west of Monocacy Valley. He kept his family supplied with
great stock of game, and he cured the animals' skins. When he had a
sufficient store of skins he set out to market them in Philadelphia.

The city William Penn had founded on the banks of the Delaware was then
a small but prosperous village. It had been designed on the plan of a
checker-board, and most of the houses were surrounded by well-kept
gardens and flourishing orchards. Primitive as it was, the country boy
looked at it with wondering admiration. The houses, which were really
very simple, were palaces to him, when he thought of his father's log
cabin. The men and women, dressed in the latest importations brought
from London by sailing vessels, were figures of surpassing style and
elegance.

Life in Philadelphia seemed very rich to Daniel Boone; he liked to
loiter along the streets and look in at the wide gardens and the
comfortable white porches, and he liked to stop and watch a city chaise
drive by, with a man in a claret or plum-colored suit and a woman in a
bright taffeta gown. They were almost a different race from the
buckskin-clad people of the wilderness from whom he