founded in the nature of my race," he replied. "The Indian's eye cannot be satisfied with a description of things, howsoever beautiful may be the style or the harmonies of verse in which it is conveyed. For neither the periods of burning eloquence, nor the mighty and beautiful creations of the imagination can unbosom the treasures and realities as they live in their own native magnificence on the eternal mountains and in the secret untrodden vale.

"As soon as you thrust the plowshare under the earth, it teems with worms and useless weeds. It increases population to an unnatural extent creates the necessity of penal enactments-builds the jail-erects the gallows-spreads over the human face a mask of deception and selfishness-and substitutes villany, love of wealth and power, and the slaughter of millions for the gratification of some royal cut-throat, in the place of the single-minded honesty, the hospitality, the honor, and the purity of the natural state. Hence, whenever agriculture appears, the increase of moral and physical evil induces the thousand necessities, as they are termed, for abridging human liberty; for fettering down the mind to the principles of right, derived not from nature, but from a restrained and forced condition of existence. And hence, my race, with mental and physical habits as free as the waters that flow from the hills, become restive under the rules of civilized life; dwindle to their graves under the control of laws and customs, and forms, which have grown out of the endless vices and the factitious virtues of another race.

"Red men often acquire and love the sciences; but with the nature the Great Spirit has given them, what are all their truths to them? Would an Indian ever measure the height of a mountain that he could climb? No, never! The legends of his tribe tell him nothing about quadrants and base-lines, and angles. Their old braves, however, have for ages watched from the cliffs the green life in the spring, and the yellow death in the autumn of their holy forests. Why should he ever calculate an eclipse? He always knew such occurrences to be the doings of the Great Spirit. Science, it is true, can tell the times and seasons of their coming; but the Indian, when they do occur, looks through Nature, without the aid of Science, up to its cause. Of what use is a Lunar to him? His swift canoe has the green embowered shores and well known head-lands to guide his course. In fine, what are the arts of Peace, of War, of Agriculture, or anything civilized to him? His nature and its elements, like the pine which shadows his wigwam, are too mighty, too grand, of too strong a fiber to form a stock on which to ingraft the rose or the violet of polished life. No! I must range the hills; I must always be able to out-travel my horse; I must always be able to strip my own wardrobe from the backs of the deer and buffalo, and to feed upon their rich loins; I must always be able to punish my enemy with my own hand, or I am no longer an Indian. And if I am anything else, I am a mere imitation, an ape."

The enthusiasm, with which these sentiments were uttered, impressed me with an awe I had never previously felt for the unborrowed dignity and independence of the genuine original character of the American Indians. Enfeebled and reduced to a state of dependence by disease and the crowding hosts of civilized men, find among them still too much of their own to adopt the character of any other race; too much bravery to feel like a conquered people, and a preference of annihilation to the abandonment of that course of life, consecrated by a hundred generations of venerated

ancestors.

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This Indian had been trapping among the Rocky Mountains for seventeen years. During that time, he has often been employed as an express to carry news from one trading-post to another and from the mountains of the Missouri. In these journeys he has been remarkable for the directness of his courses, and the exceeding short spaces of time required to accomplish them. Mountains that neither Indian nor white man dared attempt to scale, he has crossed. Angry streams, heavy and cold from the snows, and plunging and roaring among the girded caverns of the hills, he has swam. He has met the tempest as it groaned over the plains and hung upon the trembling towers of the everlasting hills; and without a horse, or even a dog, traversed often the terrible and boundless wastes of mountains and plains and desert valleys; and the ruder the blast, the larger the bolts, and louder the peals of the dreadful tempest, when the earth and sky seemed joined by a moving cataract of flood and flame driven by the wind, the more was it like himself, a free, unmarred manifestation of the sublime energies of Nature. He said that he never again intended to visit the States, or any other part of the earth, "which has been torn and spoiled by the slaves of Agriculture." "I shall live," said he, "and die in the wilderness." And assuredly he should thus live and die. The music of the rushing waters should be his requiem and the Great Wilderness his tomb!.

LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS OF VIRGINIA.

THIS description-written some time since by the compiler of this volume for another publication-in general, will apply to the inhabitants of the range of mountains which occupy the western parts of Virginia and the Carolinas, and the eastern portions of Kentucky and Tennessee, and of north Georgia; as they are all essentially the same people in origin, modes of life, and in their isolation from the rest of the country. While they, in many respects, resemble the settlers on the frontiers of the Far West, in others they are dissimilar, the progress of the country being slower, their isolation greater, and the spirit of enterprise less.

Those who have been bred in, and have not traveled out of the

old and long-settled portions of our Union, can have but inaccurate ideas of the modes of life in its new and sparsely inhabited regions. And, perchance, when they do gain experience of this nature, they find much to amuse and instruct, not in ascertaining "how the other half of the world live," but in observing how others, dwelling under the same institutions, protected by the same laws, and with the same star-dotted flag waving above, march onward along the highway of life.

In the inhabitants of none will there be found a greater diversity than between those of the north and east, and those of the more secluded mountain counties of Virginia. A great part of Western Virginia is yet a new country and so thinly settled, that the population of a whole county frequently does not equal that of a single agricultural township of the former. Remote and inaccessible as they are, the manners and habits of the population are quite primitive. So far are they from market, that the people in many districts can sell only what will, as they say, "walk away," that is, cattle, horses, swine, etc. Consequently there is but little inducement to raise more than sufficient grain for home consumption, and next to none for enterprise on the part of the agriculturist. For foreign luxuries, as sugar, tea, coffee, etc., the mountaineer is obliged to pay an enormous advance in the heavy cost of transportation; but, graduating his desires to his means, he leads a simple, yet manly life, and breathes the pure air of the mountains with the contented spirit of a freeman.

Thus the inhabitant of these elevated regions is almost perfectly independent. The cares, the fruits of a more luxurious state, the turmoil of business, the aims of fashion, the struggles for social supremacy, all these to him are things unknown. He has heard. of cities, of their wonders of art, of their magnificent temples; but, untraveled as he is, these reports fall upon his ears almost like revelations from another hemisphere.

Here many a young man, with but few worldly goods, marries; and with an ax on one shoulder, and a rifle on the other, goes into the recesses of the mountains where land is of no market value. In a few days he has a log-house and a small clearing. Visit some such on a fine day, when thirty years have rolled past, and you will find he has eight or ten children--a hardy, healthy set-thirty or forty acres cleared, mostly cultivated in corn; a rude, square log bin, built in cob-house fashion, and filled with corn, will stand beside his cabin; near, a similar structure contains his horse; scattered about are half a dozen hayricks, and an immense drove of swine will be roaming in the adjacent forest; and if it is called "mast-year"—that is, a season when the woods abound in nuts, acorns, etc., these animals, swelling with fatness, will display evidence of good living.

Enter the dwelling. The woman of the house, and all her children, are attired in homespun. Her dress is large and convenient, and instead of being closed by hooks and eyes, is buttoned together.

She looks strong and healthy; so do her daughters; and rosy and blooming as "flowers by the wayside." The house and furniture are exceedingly plain and simple, and with the exception of what belongs to the cupboard, principally manufactured in the neighborhood. The husband is absent hunting. At certain seasons, what time he can spare from his little farm, he passes in the excitement of the chase, and sells the skins of his game.

Soon he enters with a buck or a bear he has shot-for he is a skillful marksman-or, perhaps, some other game, He is fifty years of age, yet in his prime-a stout, athletic man, robed in a hunting-shirt of picturesque form, made, too, of homespun, and ornamented with variegated fringe; and a pair of moccasins are on his feet. He receives you with a blunt, honest welcome, and as he gives you his hand his heart goes with it; for he looks upon you as a friend. He has passed his life in the mountains among a simple-hearted people, who have but little practical knowledge of the deceit which those living in luxurious, densely-populated communities, among the competitory avocations of society, are tempted to practice. His wife prepares dinner. A neat, white cloth is spread; and soon the table is covered with good things. On it is a plate of hot corn-bread, preserves of various kinds, bacon, venison, and perhaps bear's meat. Your host may ask a blessingthanks to the itinerating system of the Methodists, which has even reached this remote spot!-his wife pours you out a dish of coffee, the greatest luxury of the country; it is thickened with cream, not milk, and sweetened with sugar from the maple grove just in front of the house. The host bids you help yourself, and you partake with a relish you never had at Astor's.

Now mount your nag and be off! As you descend the mountain path, faintly discerned before you, and breathe the pure, fresh air of the hills, cast your eyes upon one of the most impressive scenes; for Nature is there in all her glory. Far down in the valley to the right, winds a lovely stream; there hid by the foliage overarching its bright waters; anon it appears in a clearing; again concealed by a sweep of the mountain you are descending; still beyond it reappears, diminished to a silvery thread. To the right and front is a huge mountain, in luxuriant verdure, at places curving far into the plain, and at those points and at the summits bathed in a sea of light; at others, receding, thrown into dark, sombre, forbidding shades. Beyond are mountains piled on mountains, like an uptossed ocean of ridges; these melt, by distance, into fainter and still fainter hues, until sky and mountain, assuming the same delicate, ethereal tint of lighest blue, appear to meet as one far, far away at the onter line of the visible world.

High in blue ether float clouds of snowy white; and in majestic flight sails the bird of the mountain with an air wild and free as the spirit of liberty. How everything is rejoicing all around! Innumerable songsters are warbling sweetest music; those wild flowers, with scarce the morning dew from off their lips, are

opening their bright cheeks to the sun; and even the tiny insects flitting through the air, join in the universal halleluiah.

Now, fast losing the scene, you are entering the dark, solemn forest. Soon you are at the base of the mountain, when, from the copse, out starts a deer! The graceful, timid creature pricks up her ears, distends her nostrils in fear, gathers her slender limbs for a spring, pauses for a moment, and then suddenly bounds away, over hillocks and through ravines, and is seen no more. The stream, broad and shallow, is wending its way across your road with gentle murmurings. Splash! splash! goes your horse's feet in the water; forty times in ten miles does it cross your road, and in various places for hundreds of yards your course is directly through it. There are no bridges across it, and next to none in Western Virginia.

The above picture of a mountaineer, with the sketch of the wild and romantic scenery in which "he moves, lives, and has his being," is a common, though not a universal one.

These mountain fastnesses contain much latent talent, requiring opportunity only for development; but the sparsely-settled condition of the country prevents such from being given. Many of the people are of Scotch-Irish descent, possessing the bravery and other noble traits of their ancestry. Almost entirely isolated from the world, fashion has not stereotyped manners, modes of thought, and expression; hence, striking originality in idea and ingenuity in metaphor, often are displayed. Not unfrequently in the presence of some one of these unlettered men, have I been humbled in view of an intellect naturally far my superior; an intellect seizing subjects with an iron grasp, perceiving clearly, comparing accurately, combining strongly, and although expressing uncouthly, yet with a power that many a one who has passed his days in academic groves could not equal. Such is the influence of mind that, whether seen in the elevated or lowly, in the man of elegance or the rude mountaineer, we instinctively bow in deference.

Toward the close of an autumnal day, in the year 1843, while traveling through this thinly-settled region, I came up with a substantial-looking farmer, leaning on the fence by the roadside. I accompanied him to his house to spend the night. It was a log dwelling, and near it stood another log structure about twelve feet square-the weaving shop of the family. On entering the dwelling I found a numerous family, all clothed in substantial garments of their own manufacture. The floor was unadorned by a carpet, and the room devoid of superfluous furniture, yet they had all that necessity required for their comfort. One needs but little experience like this to discover how few are our real wants-how easily most luxuries of dress, furniture, and equipage can be dispensed with. Soon after my arrival supper was ready. It consisted of fowls, bacon, hoe-cake, and buckwheat cakes. Our beverage was