he now awaited the blow of his antagonist, intending that his next thrust should be still more vigorous. But the young stranger appeared much better disposed to partake of the good cheer, with which he had been so providentially provided, than to take up the cudgels of argument on this, or on any other of the knotty points which are so apt to furnish the lovers of science with the materials of a mental joust.

“I dare say you are very right, sir,” he replied, with a most provoking indifference to the importance of the points he conceded. “I dare say you are quite right; and that vacca would have been the better word.”

“Pardon me, sir; you are giving a very wrong construction to my language, if you suppose I include, without many and particular qualifications, the bibulus Americanus, in the family of the vacca. For, as you well know, sir-or, as I presume I should say, Doctor —you have the medical diploma, no doubt?”

“You give me credit for an honour I cannot claim,” interrupted the other.

“An under-graduate!—or perhaps your degrees have been taken in some other of the liberal sciences?”

“Still wrong, I do assure you.”

“Surely, young man, you have not entered on this important—I may say, this awful service, without some evidence of your fitness for the task! Some commission by which you can assert an authority to proceed, or by which you may claim an affinity and a communion with your fellow-workers in the same beneficent pursuits!”

“I know not by what means, or for what purposes, you have made yourself master of my objects!” exclaimed the youth, reddening and rising with a quickness which manifested how little he regarded the grosser appetites, when a subject nearer his heart was approached. “Still, sir, your language is incomprehensible. That pursuit, which in another might perhaps be justly called beneficent, is, in me, a dear and cherished duty; though why a commission should be demanded or needed is, I confess, no less a subject of surprise.”

“It is customary to be provided with such a document,” returned the Doctor, gravely; “and, on all suitable occasions to produce it, in order that congenial and friendly minds may, at once, reject unworthy suspicions,a nd stepping over, what may be called the elements of discourse, come at once to those points which are desiderata to both.”

“It is a strange request!” the youth muttered, turning his frowning eye from one to the other, as if examining the characters of his companions, with a view to weigh their physical powers. Then, putting his hand into his bosom, he drew forth a small box, and extending it with an air of dignity towards the Doctor, he continued— “You will find by this, sir, that I have some right to travel in a country which is now the property of the American States.”

“What have we here!” exclaimed the naturalist, opening the folds of a large parchment. “Why, this is the sign-manual of the philosopher, Jefferson! The seal of state! Countersigned by the minister of war! Why this is a commission creating Duncan Uncas Middleton a captain of artillery!”

“Of whom? of whom?” repeated the trapper, who had sat regarding the stranger, during the whole discourse, with eyes that seemed greedily to devour each lineament. “How is the name? did you call him Uncas?—Uncas! Was it Uncas?”

“Such is my name,” returned the youth, a little haughtily. “It is the appellation of a native chief, that both my uncle and myself bear with pride; for it is the memorial of an important service done my family by a warrior in the old wars of the provinces.”

“Uncas! did ye call him Uncas?” repeated the trapper, approaching the youth and parting the dark curls which clustered over his brow, without the slightest resistance on the part of their wondering owner. “Ah! my eyes are old, and not so keen as when I was a warrior myself; but I can see the look of the father in