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forth the sermon of the living preacher; the divine genius of Goldsmith impulsively warbled as the birds of the wilderness carol to the skies. To-day this good man and his sermon on baptism would, in one of our very fashionable city churches, be laughed at; but you must not imagine that therefore Goldsmith would, on the other hand, be lifted up and lionized by all people. On Broadway, he would be much the poor, wretched outcast he was one hundred years ago in the streets of London— just as likely to freeze and starve in a garret to-day as he did then; but the preacher and his great sermon would be haughtily directed by the bishop's butler to apply at the "little church around the corner.

With the close of the eighteenth century there were permanent settlers here, and they had reached a time when men began to draw away from that intense age of religious fanaticism, that wild craze on the subject that had whelmed the civilized world in the five hundred years of the Dark Ages, and were inclined to mix in their thoughts and purposes some of the more practical affairs of life. They were rapidly extending the view of life, and the beliefs in supernatural powers in the most trivial affairs among men were loosening their long clutch of men's minds. The representatives of the church, while they had lost none of men's devotional respect for the cloth, for the sacred office they exercised, yet their power in the family circle and in the State, and in the material concerns of the individual were slowly waning. The influence of the churchmen was thereby signally bettered. A century preceding, the church had ruled the State and unfortunately wielded the gleaming sword, and interminable religious wars had blasted the bloom of earth, and the most horrid persecutions had filled the air with the wails of the dying, innocent victims. From these cruel ages the world was slowly emerging, but resistlessly, because slowly, like the rise of the continents from the great ocean's depths, men were tasting the right of self-government; feeling the power and the good of regulating their own private and social affairs, and happily the sunshine and sweetness of advancing civilization was vexing the earth with its multitudinous sprouting. The unhappy spirit of persecution for opinion's sake was slowly fading away, and peace and blessed liberty began to streak the eastern sky; the jocund day kissing the mountain tops, foretelling the noontide flooding the deep valleys with effulgence.

Adjusting the prophecies was in the early part of this century the serious work of many of the world's holy seers; these cabalistic interpreters were a very important feature of the times, and they burned the midnight oil, and the press teemed with their books for all men to read. For many years these things raged with the utmost activity, like everything of the kind in answer to a popular demand. The obscure parts of the books of Daniel and the Revelations of John were the fruitful sources of supply for the remarkable output of the press of that day. These ranged in all degrees, from the most learned and solemn to the seriocomic, but all intended to show that the great oracles of the church were still abroad in the land; their erudition was astounding, their secular flavoring overpowering, and their demonstrations startling, ludicrous and, at times, whimsical.

A man named Kett wrote and published a book entitled, History the Best Interpreter of Prophecy, and he seriously demonstrates "the man of sin" is at once "both the Papal power and the French infidelity;" that the "little horn of Daniel's fourth beast" designates Mohammedanism, Popery and French infidelity; the beast of the bottomless pit which slays the two witnesses spoken of in the eleventh chapter of Revelations typifies the same infidel power; that Daniel's little horn of the goat and of his third beast the Leopard symbolize Mohammed and the French infidelity; that the second beast of St. John, which is to arise out of the earth and "the images to which he is to give life" are "infidelity and democracy;" that the two horns of the beast are "the German illuminati and French pseudo philosophers;" that the particular democratic tyranny, symbolized by the image of the

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beast, is the revolutionary republic of France and that the mark of the beast is the tri-colored cockade.

A contemporary of Kett's was one who called himself Galloway. This oracle read that the earth out of which John's second beast arose was France; the beast himself the French republic-his head the legislature; his two horns the committee of safety, and the fire he was to call down was the wrath of God; his marvelous performances were the French victories; the image he was to set up, the prostitute goddess of reason and liberty; his mark the cap of liberty and the cockade; that his number latinized is 666, the name of the monarch Louis XVI.

The aggressive pioneers pressed the Indians that skirted along the Atlantic shore back toward the Alleghanies, and then across the mountains and on to the Mississippi river, and across that and then to the Rocky mountains, and eventually across these snow-clad ranges and down the slope and finally to the Pacific ocean. Nearly 300 years were consumed in these long and often bloody journeyings of the two peoples so distinct in color and instincts. They were antagonistic races that could not well exist together. The Indian's supreme impulse was that of absolute freedom -liberty in its fullest extent, where there was no law other than that of physical strength and courage; might was right, and from that the weak had no appeal save that of the stoic's divine right to death. The Indian's death song was therefore a part of his deep-seated philosophy, and whether cooped up on the tall cliff-Starved Rock-and slowly starved to death in famine or slain in battle, or dying of disease, his last and supreme act was to chant his weird death-song. Death then was not

his one dreaded, invisible foe. When he could fight and kill no more, then it was his friend-the angel with outstretched wings in his extremity, tenderly carrying him away from his enemy and his pain. His ideal was that animal life typified in the screaming eagle of the crags or the spring of the striped tiger, whose soft foot had carried it in reach of its unsuspecting prey.

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The rugged and weather-beaten pioneer, he or his ancestors had fled from tyranny and religious persecutions, severely austere toward his own real or imaginary faults, welcoming any infliction that would only purify, as by fire, his soul, and fleeing from the persecutor of the body, he erected his altars to a god that was simply inappeasable, not only for his own sins, but for the yielding to temptation of the first mother of the human race, and this he unfalteringly believed "brought death into the world and all our woe. This creature of curious contradictions, while over-exacting toward himself, and welcoming any and all self-inflicted stripes, slept on his arms for anything mortal that dared to threaten or trespass on his religious rights or beliefs-yielding all to his God, he would yield nothing to anyone or anything else. He would put a padlock on his mouth, that it might not speak evil, and his very thoughts in the stocks, that he might not think evil-silence and dreams of the glories of heaven alternating with the groans and outcries of the damned, and eyes. closed to all earthly things, he even tried to control the strong impulses of his heart in its love for wife or children in the fear that God would be jealous and might blast forever his soul with a frown. And from the depths of his troubled life he would cry out that he could do nothing to please God-that he was utterly unworthy and totally wicked; that his whole inheritance through a thousand ancestors was sin, and it would be but a supreme mercy in his Maker to cast him out forever. He invented his own penance, inflicted his own judgments, clothed himself in sackcloth and ashes, and finally consigned himself as the only mercy he deserved as he believed-the endless tortures of hell.

This was the fugitive, the waif cast upon the troubled waters, that came from the old to the new in the hunt of religious liberty and a home. Unkempt and unwashed, rough and storm-beaten, with long, bushy hair, and in his leather jerkin this apparition stood before the savages of the valley of the Susquehanna, rifle in hand, one foot thrown forward, braced, erect, his keen eye directed straight into the

wild man's soul; there he had put his heavy foot down, and the quick instinct of the savage told him never to take it up again. The wild man struck like the coiled snake; the crack of the white man's rifle echoed through the old forest trees, and stilled the serpent's rattle forever.

The first habitation was an open faced brush house, if such a thing can be called a house at all. It was between two trees standing close together-a pole across, and leaned against this was brush, bramble and leaves piled on; two wings projected from the ends similarly constructed, and the whole front open, and here was the camp-fire. The furniture was a pile of dry leaves on one side of this brush dwelling. This was rather a poor protection, yet there was a time when it has been all some of the earliest pioneers had during their first long winter in the remote wilderness. They possibly had simply wintered there intending to resume their journey when warm weather came. Sometimes they thus camped, waiting the fall of the high waters in the stream. These advance couriers of civilization were encumbered with no camp equipage; the old heavy rifle, and the hunting knife, and the few leather clothes they wore were all they had. Then, too, they may have reached the one spot in the wilderness they had traveled so far to find. Just there a stream or a spring of sweet water, the giant trees extending their strong protecting arms, and the abundant evidences of game on every hand may have been the determining cause, or, as was often the case, living away back in Massachusetts or Connecticut, the young man had met some hunter and trapper, and had made eager inquiries as to where he could find the best place in the new country, and the hunter had mapped out to his mind the long way to that particular spot. How he would pursue a certain course, guided by the sun and the north star, or the moss on the trees, and just where he would cross certain rivers and streams, and follow these to such a point, then deflect to the right or left and strike a certain mountain range, and after a while in the blue distance a point of timber, and from that another point, and then for days and days and another stream and follow up that to where a creek or arm emptied into it, thence up that stream, and then on and on and a spring would be reached--a natural camping place and perhaps the end of the long journey, and to day his grandchildren born on the old farm where he first stopped and put up his brush house may not know or be able to find the spring that was his objective point when he so bravely started from his old pioneer father's home in the east. The brush covering protected him somewhat from the inclement elements, the fire in front served a double purpose it warmed and dried him when wet or cold and kept away the fierce wild animals that otherwise would have attacked and devoured him. If during the night it burned low, the screams of the panther or the howls of the close-coming wolves would admonish him to throw a few sticks on the fire, or sometimes amuse himself by firing at the eyes of the beast that was so near him that its gleaming eyeballs would make an excellent target.

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The first months of this man's life in the wilderness were spent in the most primitive manner. He procured his food by his rifle, supplemented with the natural fruits and berries of the woods, learning to eat many of the roots he could dig, neighbored much with the Indians, and often got of them some of their coarse materials for making bread. The one chief deprivation, both to him and the Indians, was the want of salt. This no doubt was the one luxury of which he would often dream that he had left behind him when he ventured out from civilization. Early in the spring he was hunting in the woods for the wild onions that are among the first to push their green stems above the soil, and in the wild sheep-sorrel he found the delicious acid that his system so much needed, then the May-apples, and then the berries, the pawpaws, the nuts and wild grapes, the buds, the bark of certain trees, and at a certain time in spring the tap-root of the young hickory, were all in their turn within his reach, and were utilized.

. This was the first little wave, the immediate forerunner of the round log cabin.

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