 timoursome,
even though they may not account me as out-of-the-way brave. But I'm not
quarrelsome, and that goes a great way towards keeping blood off the hands,
among the hunters and red-skins, and then, Harry March, it keeps blood off the
conscience, too.«
    »Well, for my part, I account game, a red skin, and a Frenchman, as pretty
much the same thing; though I'm as onquarrelsome a man, too, as there is in all
the colonies. I despise a quarreller, as I do a cur dog, but one has no need to
be over scrupulsome, when it's the right time to show the flint.«
    »I look upon him as the most of a man, who acts nearest the right, Hurry.
But this is a glorious spot, and my eyes never aweary looking at it!«
    »'Tis your first acquaintance with a lake, and these idees come over us all,
at such times. Lakes have a general character, as I say, being pretty much
water, and land, and points, and bays.«
    As this definition by no means met the feelings that were uppermost in the
mind of the young hunter, he made no immediate answer, but stood gazing at the
dark hills and the glassy water, in silent enjoyment.
    »Have the governor's, or the King's people given this lake a name?« he
suddenly asked, as if struck with a new idea. »If they've not begun to blaze
their trees, and set up their compasses, and line off their maps, it's likely
they've not bethought them to disturb natur' with a name.«
    »They've not got to that yet, and the last time I went in with skins, one of
the king's surveyors was questioning me consarning all the region, hereabouts.
He had heard that there was a lake, in this quarter, and had got some general
notions about it, such as that there was water and hills, but how much of
either, he know'd no more than you know of the Mohawk tongue. I did'nt open the
trap any wider than was necessary, giving him but poor encouragement in the way
of farms and clearings. In short, I left on his mind some such opinion of this
country, as a man gets of a spring of dirty water, with a path to it that is so
muddy that one mires afore he sets out
