WALKER.

I confess to knowledge of a large book bearing the above title,—­a title which is no less appropriate for this brief, disrupted biographical memorandum.  That I have a right to act as I have done, in adopting it, will presently appear,—­as well as that the honored name thus appropriated by me refers neither io the dictionary nor the filibustero, both of which articles appear to have been superseded by newer and better things.

At the first flush, Fur would seem to be rather a sultry subject to open either a store or a story with, in these glowing days of a justly incensed thermometer.

And yet there is a fine bracing mountain-air to be drawn from the material, as with a spigot, if you will only favor your mind with a digression from the tangible article to the wild-rose associations in which it is enveloped.

Think of the high, wind-swept ridges, among the clefts of which are the only homesteads of the hardy pioneers by whose agency alone one kind of luxury is kept up to the standard demand for it in the great cities.  It might not be so likely a place to get fancy drinks in as Broome Street, certainly, we must admit, as we picture to ourselves some brushy ravine in which the trapper has his irons cunningly set out for the betrayal of the stone-marten and the glossy-backed “fisher-cat,”—­but the breeze in it is quite as wholesome as a brandy-smash.  The whirr of the sage-hen’s wing, as she rises from the fragrant thicket, brings a flavor with it fresher far than that of the mint-julep.  It is cheaper than the latter compound, too, and much more conducive to health.  Continuing to indulge our fancy in cool images connected with fur and its finders, we shall see what contrasts will arise.  The blue shadow of a cottonwood-tree stretching over a mountain-spring.  By the edge of the sparkling water sits, embroidering buckskin, a red-legged squaw, keeper of the wigwam to the ragged mountain-man who set the traps that caught the martens which furnished the tails that mark so gracefully the number of skins of which the rich banker’s wife’s fichu-russe is composed.  Here is a striking contrast, in which extremes meet,—­not the martens’ tails, but the two men’s wives, the banker’s and the trapper’s, brought into antithetical relation by the simple circumstance of a fichu-russe, the material of which was worn in some ravine of the wilderness, mayhap not a twelvemonth since, by a creature faster even than a banker’s wife.  Great is the hereafter of the marten-cat, whose skin may be looked upon as the soul by which the animal is destined to attain a sort of modified immortality in the Elysian abodes of Wealth and Fashion,—­the place where good martens go!