An individual of this description had his residence near Hartley’s Point.  Unlike those however whose dwellings rose at a distance, few and far between, hemmed in by the fruits of prosperous agriculture, he appeared to have paid But little attention to the cultivation of a soil, which in every part was of exceeding fertility.  A rude log hut, situated in a clearing of the forest, the imperfect work of lazy labour, was his only habitation, and here he had for years resided without its being known how he contrived to procure the necessary means of subsistence; yet, in defiance of the apparent absence of all resources, it was subject of general remark, that he not only never wanted money, but had been enabled to bestow something like an education on a son, who had, at the epoch opened by our narrative, been absent from him upwards of five years.  From his frequent voyages, and the direction his canoe was seen to take, it was inferred by his immediate neighbours, that he dealt in contraband, procuring various articles on the American coast, which, he subsequently disposed of in the small town of Amherstburgh (one of the principal English posts) among certain subjects domiciliated there, who were suspected of no very scrupulous desire to benefit the revenue of the country they called their own.  So well and so wisely, however, did he cover his operations, that he had always contrived to elude detection—­and, although suspicion attached to his conduct, in no instance had he openly committed himself.  The man himself, tall, stout and of a forbidding look, was of a fearless and resolute character, and if he resorted to cunning, it was because cunning alone could serve his purpose in a country, the laws of which were not openly to be defied.

For a series of years after his arrival, he had contrived to evade taking the customary oaths of allegiance; but this, eventually awakening the suspicions of the magistracy, brought him more immediately under their surveillance, when, year after year, he was compelled to a renewal of the oath, for the imposition of which, it was thought, he owed more than one of those magistrates a grudge.  On the breaking out of the war, he still remained in undisturbed possession of his rude dwelling, watched as well as circumstances would permit, it is true, but not so narrowly as to be traced in his various nocturnal excursions by water.  Nothing could be conceived more uncouth in manner and appearance than this man—­nothing more villainous than the expression of his eye.  No one knew from what particular point of the United States he had come, and whether Yankee or Kentuckian, it would have puzzled one of that race of beings, so proverbial for acumen—­a Philadelphia lawyer—­to have determined; for so completely did he unite the boasting language of the latter with the wary caution and sly cunning of the former, that he appeared a compound of both.  The general opinion, however, seemed rather, to incline in favor of the presumption that he was less Kentuckian than Yankee.