air was sweet with the wildwood fragrance of spring. Piles of mosses, soft as velvet, were scattered about. Wild violets, grouped in clusters, the white and red lupin, the mountain pink, and thousands of other tiny flowers, bright as sparks of fire, mingled in confusion. It was alive with birds; the brown thrasher, the robin, the blue-jay, poured forth their music to the very top of their lungs.

The thrasher, with his brown dress and very quizzical look, absolutely revelled in a luxury of melody. He mocked all the birds about him. Scores of blue-jays, in the tops of the trees, were picking away at the tender buds. The robin, that household bird, first loved by our children, was also here. Woodpeckers were flitting hither and thither; troops of quails whistled in the distance; the oriole streamed out his bright light through the green branches; there was a winnowing of wings, a dashing of leaves, as birds came rushing in and out. It was their festival.

This scene was heightened by the appearance of a hunter. He was a noble specimen of the physical man. Tall, brawny--a giant in strength--his form loomed up in the distance. He was attired with a red flannel "wamus," a leathern belt girt around his waist, deer-skin leggins and moccasons, and a white felt hat that ran up to a peak. His rifle and shot-pouch were slung around him, and a few fox-squirrels hung dangling on his belt. His whole figure exhibited a harmony of proportion, a majesty of combination, sometimes seen in Roman statues. As I approached him, his face fairly beamed with rustic intelligence and good nature, and the old man grasped me by the hand, and shook it as heartily as if he had known me a thousand years.

"So you are the person," said Venison Styles,--for such I afterwards learned was the name he went by in the neighborhood,--"so you are the person that's come in here to settle, I s'pose--to cut down the trees and plough up this ere ground." I told him I was. "Well," said he, "so it goes; I have moved and moved, and I can't keep out of the way of these ploughs and axes. It was just as much as the deer, and beaver, and otter, _could_ do, to stand them government surveyors that went tramping around among 'em, just as though they were going to be sold out wher-or-no. And then," continued Styles, growing warmer, "they tried to form a thing they called a school _de_-strict about my ears; and then came a church, and they put a little bell on it, and that scart out the game. Game can't stand church-bells, stranger, they can't; they clears right out."

I tried to soothe the old man's feelings, and among 

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