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with a view of settling upon it. The spot which he chose was situated in the state of Kentucky, in which he thus became the first settler. He began by erecting a house, surrounded by a stockade or close palisado, formed of the square trunks of trees, placed close together and sunk deep in the earth, a precaution absolutely necessary to be taken in a frontier settlement continually exposed to the attacks of the native Indians. This fort, as the Americans call such defences, was situated about seventy-five miles from the present town of Frankfort, and the party gave it the name of Fort Boonsborough; and thus was formed the primitive settlement of the state of Kentucky, which now has a population of 564,317. He entered his lands and secured them, as he imagined, so as to give him a safe title, and was completely established in them in the year 1775. He seems, however, to have experienced various attacks from hostile tribes of Indians. At this place, with no common resolution, and with a fortitude that argued him to be of the order of superior men, far removed from military succour, in a wild and savage forest, and with a constant fear of attack from a ferocious enemy, he steadily and undauntedly proceeded to mature his plans. When his little fort was completed, he removed his establishment to it from North Carolina, conducting thither his wife and daughters, the first white females that had ever trod on the shores of the Kentucky river. He was soon joined by four or five other families, and thirty or forty men settlers. They had several times repulsed the attacks of the Indians with bloodshed; and at length, while making salt from some brine springs at no great distance from his home, he was surprised, together with twenty-seven of his settlers, by upwards of a hundred, who were on their march to renew their attacks on his infant colony. He capitulated with them on condition that their lives should be spared, and they were immediately marched away to an Indian town on the Miami river, a long distance off, and finally conducted to the British governor, Hamilton, at Detroit, the Indians scrupulously abiding by the terms on which Boon had surrendered to them. These sons of nature, however, got so attached to their prisoner on their march, that they would not resign him to the British governor, nor even part with him for a hundred pounds generously offered for him by the British officers, in order that he might return home to his family; but leaving his fellow-settlers behind, they took him away with them again, adopted him into the family of one of their chiefs, and allowed him to hunt or spend his time in the way most agreeable to his inclination. One day he went with them to make salt, when he met with four hundred and fifty warriors painted and armed, and ready to set out against Fort Boonsborough. He immediately determined, at a great risk of his life, to make his escape, trembling as he was for the fate of his family and settlement. In four days he reached Boonsborough, a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, making only one meal by the way. Not a minute was to be lost, and he began to strengthen his log defences and fortify himself as strongly as possible. The Indians, finding he had escaped, delayed their attack; and having received a reinforcement of men, in which were a few troops, he determined to brave all dangers and defend himself to the last. At length a ferocious Indian army made its appearance. Boon encouraged his little garrison to maintain an obstinate defence, death being preferable to captivity,

though his hope of resisting with success was but faint. The cruel and savage enemy also, they might well calculate, would become doubly enraged by a protracted resistance; but like brave men, determined to let fate do its worst and think nothing of final consequences, they let the Indian chief know their resolution. Upon this the latter demanded a parley with nine of the garrison; articles were proposed for an arrangement without bloodshed; but on signing them they were told it was the Indian custom to shake hands with each other by way of sealing their engagement. On complying, each Indian grappled his man in order to make him prisoner, but, by a miracle, eight out of the nine succeeded in extricating themselves, Boon being among the number, and they got safe into their garrison. A furious attack was now made upon the fort, which lasted nine days and nights, during which only two men were killed and four wounded by the besiegers, who in return suffered severely, and the logs of the fort were stuck full of the bullets which they fired. At length hostilities ceasing, Boon's wife, who on his first captivity supposing him killed, had set off with her family on horseback through the woods a long and dangerous distance into North Carolina, was fetched back by her husband a second time to his new residence, where he hoped for the future to pursue his peaceful occupations unmolested. His sufferings and perils had been great, but his courage and constancy had surmounted them all, and he had just reason to calculate at last upon a period of repose.

Boon, however, was not to end his days amid the advantages of social life. His horoscope had been cast, and discovered no common portion of malign influence. His courage and constancy, under the severest trials; his long and unremitting labours, in perfecting his infant settlement, almost entitled him to a civic crown; but how different was his reward! After his exemplary labours, after spending the best part of an honest life in rearing and providing for a numerous family, and having arrived at that period of existence when he might reasonably expect to enjoy the fruit of his exertions, and obtain some return for the fatigues and hazards of his preceding life; too old to begin another settlement, and that which he had begun so many years before in the heart of the wilderness, looking smiling around him, the prop of his old age, the pride of his hoary years, his family's hope when he should be laid low-he suddenly finds that he is possessed of nothing, that his eyes must be closed without a home, and that he must be an outcast in his grey hairs. His heart is torn, his feelings are lacerated by the chicanery of the law, which discovers that there is a defect in his title to the land of which he was the first settler, even in a state where no white man had put in the spade before him. Perhaps his thriving farm was envied by some new adventurer. The discovery was fatal to his happiness. While he fondly believed that his title was indisputable, his land was taken from him, his goods were sold, and he was deprived of his all. The province had been rapidly settling by his countrymen, and encreasing civilization was accompanied by those vices which are its never-failing attendants. Knavery, in every form, marched with it; interest, at any sacrifice of honour and justice, became the reigning principle. The law, which in all countries inflicts nearly as much evil as it prevents, was made an instrument to dispossess him of his property, and he saw himself a wanderer and an outcast. His

past labour, even to blood, had been in vain. Cut to the soul, with a wounded spirit, he still showed himself an extraordinary and eccentric man. He left for ever the state in which he had been the first to introduce a civilized population-where he had so boldly maintained himself against external attacks, and shown himself such an industrious and exemplary citizen; where he found no white man when he sat himself down amid the ancient woods, and left behind him half a million. He forsook it for ever; no intreaty could keep him within its bounds. Man, from whom he deserved every thing, had persecuted and robbed him of all. He bade his friends and his family adieu for ever; he felt the tie which linked him to social life was broken. He took with him his rifle and a few necessaries, and crossing the Ohio, pursued his track till he was two or three hundred miles in advance of any white settlement. As the territory north of the Ohio was taken possession of, and peopling fast from the United States, he crossed the Missisippi, and plunged into the unknown and immense country on the banks of the Missouri, where the monstrous Mammoth is even now supposed to be in existence. On the shores of this mighty river he reared his rude log hut, to which he attached no idea of permanency, but held himself constantly ready to retire yet farther from civilized man, should he approach too near his desert solitude. With the exception of a son, who resided with his father, according to some accounts, but without any one, according to others, his dog and gun were his only companions. He planted the seeds of a few esculent vegetables round his fragile dwelling, but his principal food he obtained by hunting. He has been seen seated on a log at the entrance of his hut by an exploring traveller, or far more frequently by the straggling Indian. His rifle generally lay across his knees and his dog at his side, and he rarely went farther from home than the haunts of the deer and the wild turkey, which constituted his principal support. In his solitude he would sometimes speak of his past actions, and of his indefatigable labours, with a glow of delight on his countenance that indicated how dear they were to his heart, and would then become at once silent and dejected. He would survey his limbs, look at his shrivelled hands, complain of the dimness of his sight, and lifting the rifle to his shoulder take aim at a distant object, and say that it trembled before his vision, that his eyes were losing their power, rubbing them with his hands, and lamenting that his youth and manhood were gone, but hoping his legs would serve him to the last of life, to carry him to spots frequented by the game, that he might not starve. It does not appear that he talked much of the ingratitude of mankind towards him. He perhaps thought regret and complaint alike unavailing, and that his resolution of exiling himself in the back woods and the territories of the Indians was the best way of demonstrating the high-spirited contempt and indignation he felt towards his countrymen, by whom he had been so unjustly treated. Boon seems to have possessed a great mind; congregated men had treated him with injustice and with cruelty, considering his claims upon them; he sought not to retaliate his injuries on individuals he felt not the passion of revenge, nor the wish to injure those who had injured him irreparably, but he viewed social man with the scorn of ill-requited merit, and he determined to withdraw from his power. He felt that he could not be happy amid the heart

less vices of society; that the desert and the forest, the Indian, the rattlesnake, and the Juagar, were preferable associates; that they bore no feigned aspect of kindness while they were secretly plotting his destruction; that they rarely inflicted evil without just provocation; and that the uncontrolled child of Nature was a preferable companion to the executors of laws, which to him at least, however beneficial they might in some cases be to others, were most cruel and unjust.

Thus he passed through life till he was between eighty and ninety years of age, contented in his wild solitude, and in his security from injustice and rapacity. About a twelvemonth ago, it is reported, he was found dead on his knees, with his rifle cocked and resting on the trunk of a fallen trec, as if he had just been going to take aim, most probably at a deer, when death suddenly terminated his earthly recollections of the ingratitude of his fellow-creatures, at a period when his faculties, though he had attained such an age, were not greatly impaired. Boonsborough is now a thriving town, and its name will ever remain as a testimony of its founder's sufferings, and the conduct of his fellowcitizens towards him, in the midst of the freest nation of ancient or modern times. Y. I.

THE LOST PLEIAD.

"Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below."-LORD BYRON.

AND is there glory from the Heavens departed?
-Oh, void unmark'd !-thy sisters of the sky
Still hold their place on high,

Though from its rank thine orb so long hath started,
Thou! that no more art seen of mortal eye!
Hath the Night lost a gem, the regal Night?
-She wears her crown of old magnificence,
Though thou art exiled thence!
No desert seems to part those urns of light,
Midst the far depths of purple gloom intense.
They rise in joy, the starry myriads burning!
The Shepherd greets them on his mountains free,
And from the silvery sea

To them the Sailor's wakeful eye is turning;

-Unchanged they rise, they have not mourn'd for thee!
Couldst thou be shaken from thy radiant place,
Ev'n as a dew-drop from the myrtle-spray,
Swept by the wind away?

Wert thou not peopled by some glorious race,
And was there power to smite them with decay?
Why, who shall talk of Thrones, of Sceptres riven?
It is too sad to think on what we are,
When from its height afar,

A world sinks thus ! and yon majestic Heaven
Shines not the less for that one vanish'd star!

F. H.

THE PROGRESS OF COXCOMBRY.

"Nemo repente fuit dandissimus."

THE transformation of the chrysalis into the butterfly is not more complete or surprising than that of the slovenly schoolboy into the finished civil, academic, or military dandy. The last metamorphosis is, however, more gradual than the former. The nice observer can easily mark the successive stages of its developement, from the superstitious tie of the cravat and scrupulous "brushing of the hat o'mornings," to the minute observance of the entire ceremonial of foppery, and faithful discharge of the whole duty of dandyism.

The passion for dress is, generally speaking, stronger in the fair sex than in ours, and is in them infinitely more excusable. But when it has once thoroughly laid hold of an unlucky wight, it carries him into much greater and more ridiculous excesses than we ever witness among the ladies. Dandyism, at first, is like the small speck in the cloudless azure, which to the eye of the experienced mariner presages the gathering storm. In its birth it is scarcely noticed by common observers, or noticed only to be despised. But it gradually increases by fresh accessions of vapour, until the intellectual horizon becomes completely overcast, and the sun of reason

" from far peeps with a sickly face,

Too weak the clouds and mighty fogs to chase."

The late Hugh Peters was a striking instance of how far the genuine dandymania could carry a man, who in other respects was not destitute of natural good sense. In Hugh, indeed, this disease appeared to be constitutional; he evinced evident symptoms of it at a very early age, and it continued with increasing violence to his dying day. This master-passion was not to be controlled by sickness, poverty, imprisonment or exile. It burned with as much fervour in age as in youth, and was scarcely extinguished by that universal damperdeath.

Hugh, as I have said, began dandyism at an early age. His parents were "of the straitest sect," Methodists. They, of course, reprobated all vain adornment of the outward man, considering the gauds of dress as the ensigns of Satan, and so many badges of subjection to the kingdom of darkness. They were careful that Hugh should be arrayed with the utmost plainness, in clothes of the coarsest texture, and the most ungainly fashion. The style of his habiliments was singularly ludicrous, and afforded infinite diversion to his young companions. Instead of being dressed in the fashion of boys of his own age and rank, he was attired like an old man. He usually wore a blue coat with covered buttons, which fitted him like a sentry-box, and exhibited a latitude of skirt that would have done honour to George Fox himself. You would swear that he had been measured by the tailors of Laputa, or the ingenious artist who works from hasty observations taken on the body of M. Rothschild, during its transit to the Stock-Exchange. His waistcoat was of a sober brown, with pocket-flaps "five fathom deep," that overhung a pair of scanty corduroy inexpressibles, scarce covering the cap of his knee. Grey yarn stockings, shoes, or rather

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