seldom allowed to wear them—buckskin breeches especially. Nor should we be surprised if just here were to be looked for the reason why our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were so much more energetic, manly, and upright than their grandsons and great-grandsons, and so many more of them broad-backed, clean-limbed, and six feet high.

The background to our portrait is a forest, lofty, shaggy, and dense, and the home of a thousand wild things, which, being invisible at this moment, could not, with due regard to fidelity, be introduced into our picture. The foreground is a cultivated clearing of about one hundred acres, with woody walls, unbroken in their leafy density, hemming it in on every side. Directly in front is a field of corn, the dark and thrifty green of which may well bespeak the deep, rich soil of the Paradise. Farther in are several other inclosures, either white with clover or brightly green with blue-grass, or darkly green with the yet unripened wheat. In the midst of all, and forming the central feature, stands a cabin, deserted and lowly since that unhappy night two years ago.

Scattered about the clearing, singly or in clumps, or even in small groves, are to be seen the giant survivors of the primeval forest, which, rearing high aloft their green heads and flinging afar their mighty arms, yield pleasant shade to the horses, sheep, and cattle grazing about them. But more numerous are to be seen those that are not survivors, though still standing, drained of their sap of life by the woodman's ax, which hacked those jagged girdles around their huge trunks. Standing there leafless, rigid, and gray, they remind us, in their branching nakedness, of the antlered elk, and in their gigantic unsightliness of the monstrous mastodon, that thing of grisly bone which, as a thing of life, no son of Adam ever beheld. Hard by stands an enormous oak, whose main bough, scathed and deadened by lightning, is thrust from out its ragged green robe like the extended, unsleeved arm of a giant, leaving a broad gap in the foliage open to the sky.

Upon this blasted limb of the oak, as if met there to hold an indignation meeting relative to the scare-crows posted about the field, or to the objectionable nature of the plowman's music, or to some real or fancied cause of grievance, have congregated a large assembly of sober-feathered, sober-visaged, but noisy, wrangling, turbulent crows, who, like many unfeathered bipeds on the like occasions, seem to have left their good breeding and good sense at home. Crows and their ways have always excited much interest in the minds of philosophic men, and the maneuvers of these before us have been watched with lively curiosity by our little friend Bushie ever since we began drawing his portrait.

Chapter III.

How Big Black Burl and Bushie Figured in Each Other's Eyes.

I spied a jay-bird on a tree,
A ridin' on a swingin' lim';
He cocked his eye an' winked at me,
I cocked my gun an' winked at him;
An' de jay-bird flew away—
De jay-bird flew away—
An' lef' de lim' a-swingin'—
A-swingin'.

Such was a stanza from one of the songs that Big Black Burl was singing while he plowed. The words were simple and crude enough, yet would the melody now and then be varied with an improvised cadence of wild and peculiar sweetness, such as one might readily fancy had often been heard in the far-off, golden days of Pan and Silvanus, and the other cloven-heeled, funny-eared genii of the greenwood.

Though a swell in the ground hid them from his view, Bushie could tell almost to the minute when Burl and old Cornwallis made their turn at the farther side of the field, by the singing, which now began to draw gradually nearer. The morning was breezy, and ever and anon, when a wave of air came softly flowing over the rustling corn, the song would reach his ear with an augmented volume and distinctness that made the unseen singer seem for the moment a hundred yards nearer than he really was. At length, right leisurely, they crept in sight—Cornwallis first, with his piebald face; then, as the old horse would dip his head to nibble at the green blades under his nose, short glimpses of Burl, though for awhile no further down than his enormous coon-skin cap, made, it is said, of the biggest raccoon that was ever trapped, treed, or shot in the Paradise. But presently, observing the old horse prick up his ears at some object ahead, Burl sighted the woods from between them, and caught a glimpse of the little figure perched up there on the topmost rail of the fence, square in front. Whereat, snapping short his melody in its loudest swell, the plowman, in an altogether different key and tone, and at the top of his tremendous voice, sent forward his favorite greeting: "I yi, you dogs!" "I yi, you——" piped back Bushie; but just as he would have added "dogs," he thought that "coons" would be more pat; but not acting upon the thought in time for right effect, he supplied its place with a grin which said more plainly than words could have said it—than even "dogs" or "coons"—"I knew you would be glad to see me out here!"

And glad Burl was, for as the plow, with the pleasant smell of fresh earth and growing herbs floating about it in the air, ran out of the furrow into the fence corner, he said, looking up with huge complacency at his little master: "He's come out to de fiel' to see his ol' nigger, has he? Well, me an' Corny's a little tired, so we'll take a little blow here in de shade uf de woods, an' hab a little good soshyble talk wid our little marster."

So saying, he threw his plow-line over the plow-handle, and mounted the panel of the fence next to the one on which Bushie was sitting, and squared himself for the confab, which the little master opened thus; "Burl, just look at them crows up there on the dead limb of that big acorn-tree; what are they doing?"

"Dey's holdin' a pra'er-meetin', I 'spec'. No, not dat—camp-meetin', dey's so noisy. Or, may be, now"—eyeing his black brethren with close attention—"may be dey's holdin' a kunvintion, like Gener'l Wilkerson an' t' other big guns, to hab ol' Kaintuck stan' 'pon her own legs, so she kin lay off lan' as she please, an' fight de Injuns on her own hook."

"But why do they make so much noise?" inquired Bushie.

"Beca'se dey likes to hear 'emselves talk—eb'rybody wantin' to do all de talkin', an' nobody wantin' to do none uf de list'nin'—jes' like people."

"Don't you wish you had Betsy Grumbo out here, Burl? How she'd make their black feathers fly! And the woods are alive with squirrels. Just see how they are running up and down the trees and along the top of the fence."

"Ef I had Betsy Grumbo out here, de woods wouldn't be alive wid squirrels, an' dem black rogues up dar wouldn't be so near by—so easy an' sassy."

"Why wouldn't they?" inquired Bushie.

"Beca'se dey'd smell Betsy's breaf, an' make 'emselves scarce."

"What's the matter with Betsy's breath?"

"W'y, Bushie, if Betsy is always belchin' gunpowder, don't you know her breaf mus' smell uf gunpowder?"

"Burl," said Bushie, turning his eyes from the crows and fixing them wide open on his black chum's face, "I killed a rattlesnake yesterday, while I was out in the woods hunting May-apples—a rattlesnake as big as your leg."

"Now, Bushie, ain't you lettin' on?" said Burl with an incredulous grin. "Wusn't it a black-snake, big as your leg?"

"Do rattlesnakes always rattle with their tails when they poke out their heads to bite a man?"

"Yas, always; or to bite a boy, either."

"And are rattlesnakes ever black?"

"Neber, 'ceptin on de back, an' dare dey's brown an' yaller."

"Well, then, I reckon it must have been a black-snake, for it was black, and