
 And spoke, in friendship, every distant tongue.«
                                        Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, I.iv.3-4.
 
We have made our readers acquainted with some variety in character and nations,
in introducing the most important personages of this legend to their notice: but
in order to establish the fidelity of our narrative, we shall briefly attempt to
explain the reason why we have been obliged to present so motley a dramatis
personæ.
    Europe, at the period of our tale, was in the commencement of that
commotion, which afterwards shook her political institutions to the centre.
Louis the Sixteenth had been beheaded, and a nation, once esteemed the most
refined amongst the civilized people of the world, was changing its character,
and substituting cruelty for mercy, and subtlety and ferocity for magnanimity
and courage. Thousands of Frenchmen were compelled to seek protection in distant
lands. Among the crowds who fled from France and her islands, to the United
States of America, was the gentleman whom we have already mentioned as Monsieur
Le Quoi. He had been recommended to the favour of Judge Temple, by the head of
an eminent mercantile house in New-York, with whom Marmaduke was in habits of
intimacy, and accustomed to exchange good offices. At his first interview with
the Frenchman, our Judge had discovered him to be a man of breeding, and one who
had seen much more prosperous days, in his own country. From certain hints that
had escaped him, Monsieur Le Quoi was suspected of having been a West-India
planter, great numbers of whom had fled from St. Domingo and the other islands,
and were now living in the Union, in a state of comparative poverty, and some in
absolute want. The latter was not, however, the lot of Monsieur Le Quoi. He had
but little, he acknowledged, but that little was enough to furnish, in the
language of the country, an assortment for a store.
    The knowledge of Marmaduke was eminently practical, and there was no part of
a settler's life with which he was not familiar. Under his direction, Monsieur
Le Quoi made some purchases, consisting of a few cloths; some groceries, with a
good deal of gunpowder and tobacco; a quantity of ironware, among which was a
large proportion of Barlow's jack-knives, potash-kettles, and spiders; a very
formidable collection of crockery, of the coarsest quality, and most uncouth
forms; together with every other common article, that the art of man has devised
for his wants, not forgetting the luxuries of looking-glasses and Jew
