“Then a sorcerer leaped upon my high place, rattling many deer hoofs, and calling aloud that his brethren might hear his voice.  Light he promised them for themselves, and darkness for the camp, and he sang his war song, shouting and rattling the deer hoofs.  Also the Indians rattled deer hoofs, and it was like a giant breathing his last, being shot with many musket flashes.

“I saw steam through the darkness, for the fires were drenched and trampled by the men of the camp, and no longer shone as candles so that the Indians might see by them to shoot.  The sorcerer danced and shouted, the deer hoofs rattled, and on this side and that men fought knee to knee and breast to breast.  I saw through the wet dawn, and they who had crept around the camp as a cloud arose as grasshoppers and fled to the swamp.

“Then did the sorcerer sit upon his heels, and I beheld he had but one eye, and he covered it from the light.

“But the men in the camp shouted with a mighty shouting.  And after their shouting I heard again the voices of angels saying:  ’He hath cast the lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by line; they shall possess it forever; from generation to generation shall they dwell therein.  The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose!’”

The speaker sat down, and one of the men remarked: 

“So that’s the way the battle of Tippecanoe looked to Johnny Appleseed.”

But the smallest boy thoughtfully inquired: 

“Say, Johnny, haven’t the Indians any angels?”

“You’ll wish they was with the angels if they ever get you by the hair,” laughed one of the men.

Soldiers began moving their single cannon, a six-pounder, from one blockhouse to another.  All the men jumped up to help, as at the raising of a home, and put themselves in the way so ardently that they had to be ordered back.

When everybody but ourselves had left the starlit open place, Johnny Appleseed lay down and stretched his heels to the blaze.  A soldier added another log, and kicked into the flame those fallen away.  Though it was the end of July, Lake Erie cooled the inland forests.

Sentinels were posted in the blockhouses.  Quiet settled on the camp; and I sat turning many things in my mind besides the impending battle.  Napoleon Bonaparte had made a disastrous campaign in Russia.  If I were yet in France; if the Marquis du Plessy had lived; if I had not gone to Mittau; if the self I might have been, that always haunts us, stood ready to take advantage of the turn—­

Yet the thing which cannot be understood by men reared under old governments had befallen me.  I must have drawn the wilderness into my blood.  Its possibilities held me.  If I had stayed in France at twenty, I should have been a Frenchman.  The following years made me an American.  The passion that binds you to a land is no more to be explained than the fact that many women are beautiful, while only one is vitally interesting.