that of London that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who continually incited him to prodigies of narration.  The hairbreadth escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people, had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War, might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a venturesome Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to afford any interest in the present or glamour in the past.

It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several minor stations to the southeast.  Although Blue Lick sustained the attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders, the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at Long Cane and some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first Montgomerie and then Grant made their furious forays through the Cherokee country.  Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment, eagerly coveted a commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to speak.  Now that the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,—­that is, exhausted, decimated, their towns burned, their best and bravest slain, their hearts broken,—­the fugitives from this settlement on the Eupharsee River, as the Hiwassee was then called, gathered their household gods and journeyed back to Blue Lick, to cry out in the wilderness that they were “home” once more, and clasp each other’s hands in joyful gratulation to witness the roofs and stockade rise again, rebuilt as of yore.  Strangely enough, there were old Cherokee friends to greet them anew and to be welcomed into the stockade; for even the rigid rule of war and hate must needs be proved by its exceptions.  And there were one or two pensive philosophers among the English settlers vaguely sad to see all the Cherokee traditions and prestige, and remnants of prehistoric pseudo-civilization, shattered in the dust, and the tremulous, foreign, unaccustomed effort—­half-hearted, half-believing, half-understanding—­to put on the habitude of a new civilization.

“The white man’s religion permits poverty, but the Indian divides his store with the needy, and there are none suffered to be poor,” said Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the famous chief.  “The white men wrangle and quarrel together, even brother with brother; with us the inner tribal peace is ever unbroken.  The white men slay and rob and oppress the poor, and with many cunning treaties take now our lands and now our lives; then they offer us their religion;—­why does it seem so like an empty bowl?”

“Atta-Kulla-Kulla, you know that I am deaf,” said Richard Mivane, “and you ask me such hard questions that I am not able to hear them.”