. That is the gift of a young woman born of christian
parents, and it ought to be maintained.«
    »You are right, Pathfinder, and so far as Mabel Dunham is concerned, it
shall be maintained. But, it is time to break your fasts, and if you will follow
me, Brother Cap, I will show you how we poor soldiers live, here on a distant
frontier.«
 

                                   Chapter IX

 »Now my co-mates and partners in exile,
 Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
 Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
 More free from peril than the envious court?
 Here feel we but the penalty of Adam -«
                                                       As You Like It, II.i.1-5.
 
Serjeant Dunham made no empty vaunt, when he gave the promise, conveyed in the
closing words of the last chapter. Notwithstanding the remote frontier position
of the post, they who lived at it, enjoyed a table that, in many respects, kings
and princes might have envied. At the period of our tale, and, indeed, for half
a century later, the whole of that vast region, which has been called the west,
or the new countries, since the war of the revolution, lay a comparatively
unpeopled desert, teeming with all the living productions of nature, that
properly belonged to the climate, man and the domestic animals excepted. The few
Indians that roamed its forests then could produce no visible effects on the
abundance of the game, and the scattered garrisons, or occasional hunters, that
here and there were to be met with on that vast surface, had no other influence,
than the bee on the buckwheat field, or the humming-bird on the flower.
    The marvels that have descended to our own times, in the way of tradition,
concerning the quantities of beasts, birds and fishes that were then to be met
with, on the shores of the great lakes in particular, are known to be sustained
by the experience of living men, else might we hesitate about relating them, but
having been eye-witnesses of some of these prodigies, our office shall be
discharged with the confidence that certainty can impart. Oswego was
particularly well placed to keep the larder of an epicure amply supplied. Fish,
of various sorts, abounded in its river, and the sportsman had only to cast his
line to haul in a bass, or some other member of the finny tribe, which then
peopled the waters, as the air above the swamps of this fruitful latitude is
known to be filled with insects. Among others,
