“Their what?” demanded the trapper.

“The teeth with which nature has furnished them for defence, and in order to tear their food. Again—”

“Look you then for the teeth of this creatur’,” interrupted the trapper, who was bent on convincing a man who had presumed to enter into competition with himself, in matters pertaining to the wilds, of gross ignorance; “turn the piece round and find your inside-overs.”

The Doctor complied, and of course without success; though he profited by the occasion to take another fruitless glance at the wrinkled hide.

“Well, friend, do you find the things you need, before you can pronounce the creatur’ a duck or a salmon?”

“I apprehend the entire animal is not here?”

“You may well say as much,” cried Paul, who was now compelled to pause from pure repletion; “I will answer for some pounds of the fellow, weighed by the truest steel-yards west of the Alleghanies. Still you may make out to keep soul and body together, with what is left,” reluctantly eyeing a piece large enough to feed twenty men, but which he felt compelled to abandon from satiety; “cut in nigher to the heart, as the old man says, and you will find the riches of the piece.”

“The heart!” exclaimed the Doctor, inwardly delighted to learn there was a distinct organ to be submitted to his inspection. “Ay, let me see the heart —it will at once determine the character of the animal— certes this is not the cor— ay, sure enough it is—the animal must be of the order belluæ, from its obese habits!”

He was interrupted by a long and hearty, but still a noiseless fit of merriment, from the trapper, which was considered so ill-timed by the offended naturalist, as to produce an instant cessation of speech, if not a stagnation of ideas.

“Listen to his beasts’ habits and belly orders,” said the old man, delighted with the evident embarrassment of his rival; “and then he says it is not the core! Why, man, you are farther from the truth than you are from the settlements, with all your bookish larning and hard words; which I have, once for all, said cannot be understood by any tribe or nation east of the Rocky Mountains. Beastly habits or no beastly habits, the creatur’s are to be seen cropping the prairies by tens of thousands, and the piece in your hand is the core of as juicy a buffaloe-hump as stomach need crave!”

“My aged companion,” said Obed, struggling to keep down a rising irascibility, that he conceived would ill comport with the dignity of his character, “your system is erroneous, from the premises to the conclusion; and your classification so faulty, as utterly to confound the distinctions of science. The buffaloe is not gifted with a hump at all; nor is his flesh savoury and wholesome, as I must acknowledge it would seem the subject before us may well be characterised—”

“There I’m dead against you, and clearly with the trapper,” interrupted Paul Hover. “The man who denies that buffaloe beef is good, should scorn to eat it!”¹

The Doctor, whose observation of the bee-hunter had hitherto been exceedingly cursory, stared at the new speaker with a look which denoted something like recognition.

“The principal characteristics of your countenance, friend,” he said, “are familiar; either you, or some other specimen of your class, is known to me.”

“I am the man you met in the woods east of the big river, and whom you tried to persuade to line a yellow hornet to his nest: as if my eye was not too true to mistake any other animal for a honey-bee, in a clear day! We tarried together a week, as you may remember; you at your toads and lizards, and I at my high-holes and hollow trees: and a good job we made of it between us! I filled my tubs with the