sweetest honey I ever sent to the settlements, besides housing a dozen hives; and your bag was near bursting with a crawling museum. I never was bold enough to put the question to your face, stranger, but I reckon you are a keeper of curiosities?”²

“Ay! that is another of their wanton wickednesses!” exclaimed the trapper. “They slay the buck, and the moose, and the wild cat, and all the beasts that range the woods, and stuffing them with worthless rags, and placing eyes of glass into their heads, they set them up to be stared at, and call them the creatur’s of the Lord; as if any mortal effigy could equal the works of his hand!”

“I know you well,” returned the Doctor, on whom the plaint of the old man produced no visible impression. “I know you,” offering his hand cordially to Paul; “it was a prolific week, as my herbal and catalogues shall one day prove. Ay, I remember you well, young man. You are of the class, mammalia; order, primates; genus, homo; species, Kentucky.” Pausing to smile at his own humour, the naturalist proceeded. “Since our separation, I have journeyed far, having entered into a compactum or agreement with a certain man named Ishmael—”

“Bush!” interrupted the impatient and reckless Paul.

“By the Lord, trapper, this is the very blood-letter that Ellen told me of!”

“Then Nelly has not done me credit for what I trust I deserve,” returned the single-minded Doctor, “for I am not of the phlebotomising school at all; greatly preferring the practice which purifies the blood instead of abstracting it.”

“It was a blunder of mine, good stranger; the girl called you a skilful man.”

“Therein she may have exceeded my merits,” Dr. Battius continued, bowing with sufficient meekness. “But Ellen is a good, and a kind, and a spirited girl, too. A kind and a sweet girl I have ever found Nelly Wade to be!”

“The devil you have!” cried Paul, dropping the morsel he was sucking, from sheer reluctance to abandon the hump, and casting a fierce and direct look into the very teeth of the unconscious physician. “I reckon, stranger, you have a mind to bag Ellen, too!”

“The riches of the whole vegetable and animal world united, would not tempt me to harm a hair of her head! I love the child, with what may be called amor naturalis—or rather paternus—the affection of a father.”

“Ay—that, indeed, is more befitting the difference in your years,” Paul coolly rejoined, stretching forth his hand to regain the rejected morsel. “You would be no better than a drone at your time of day, with a young hive to feed and swarm.”

“Yes, there is reason, because there is natur’, in what he says,” observed the trapper: “but, friend, you have said you were a dweller in the camp of one Ishmael Bush?”

“True; it is in virtue of a compactum—”

“I know but little of the virtue of packing, though I follow trapping, in my old age, for a livelihood. They tell me that skins are well kept in the new fashion; but it is long since I have left off killing more than I need for food and garments. I was an eye-witness, myself, of the manner in which the Siouxes broke into your encampment, and drove off the cattle; stripping the poor man you call Ishmael of his smallest hoofs, counting even the cloven feet.”

“Asinus excepted,” muttered the Doctor, who by this time was discussing his portion of the hump, in utter forgetfulness of all its scientific attributes. “Asinus domesticus Americanus excepted.”