200 
The judge—we hope upon good evidence 
—tells a story of a miraculous escape near 
Shawnee, occurring some ten or twelve 
years ago, of a man, who fell into an am- 
buscade of Indians, and was shot through 
the body—a ball also passing through the 
breast of his horse, and coming out between 
the shoulders. Behind the passage was 
completely blocked up, and before him a 
deep miry creek, with high precipitous 
banks. Giving the rein and the spur to his 
horse, he trusted to Providence, as he calls 
it; and down the horse plunged, rose from 
the mud, and up the banks, and bore his 
rider through the thick and bushy forest, 
till he (the. rider we mean), fainted and fell 
and still went till he was six miles from 
the scene of the disaster. The course was 
carefully tracked—he had leaped about 
twenty feet to the surface of the riyer— 
had broken through the ice in the middle, 
and had climbed up an almost perpendi- 
cular bank on the other side ; and all, as he 
adds, with a heayy burden on his back, and 
wounded in a vital part, and that, according 
to persons who understood gun-shot wounds, 
where nine out of ten would have died in- 
stantly. All which is about as probable, 
perhaps, as the story of the traveller, which 
he himself gives, quizzingly, to illustrate the 
state of the Ohio roads :—- 
A weary way-farer, who journeyed through 
Olio a few years ago, illustrated his remarks 
upon the badness of the roads, by relating the 
following curious fact. We was floundering 
through the mire, as many an honest gentleman 
flonnders through life, getting along with diffi- 
culty, but still getting along; sometimes wading 
to the saddle-girth in water, sometimes clam- 
bering over logs, and occasionally plunged in a 
quagmire. While carefully picking his way by 
a spot more miry than the rest, he espied a man’s 
hat, a very creditable beaver, lying with the 
crown upwards in the mud, and as he approached, 
was not a little startled to see it move. This hap- 
pened in a dismal swamp, where the cypress 
waved its melancholy branches over the dark soil 
and the frogs croaked as mournfully as they did 
of old. under the reign of King Stork, and as in- 
cessantly as if an influenza had invaded their 
borders ; and our traveller’s flesh began to creep 
at beholding a hat move without the agency of a 
head. “ When the brains are out the Aead will 
die,” thought he, “and when the head is out, the 
hat, by the same rule, should receive its gutetus. 
Not being very superstitions, and determined to 
penetrate the mystery, the solitary rider checked 
his nag, and extending his long whip, fairly upset 
the hat—when, lo! beneath it appeared a man’s 
head, not 
*« The ghastly form, 
The lip pale, quivering, and the beamless eye, 
No more with ardour bright;” 
bat a living, laughing head, by which our inqui- 
sitive traveller heard himself saluted with, ‘ Hul- 
lo, stranger! who told you to knock my hat off?” 
The person thus addressed was so utterly asto~ 
nished as notto be able for a moment to under- 
stand that the apparition was no other than a 
fellow-creature up to the neck in the mire; but 
Monthly Review of Literature, 
[Fes. 
he no sooner came to this conclusion than he 
promptly apologized for the indecorum of which 
he had been guilty, and tendered his services to 
the gentleman in the mud puddle. “ I will alight,” 
said he, ‘‘and endeavour to draw you forth.” 
** Oh, never mind,” said the other, “ I’min rather 
abad fix, it is true, but I have an excellent horse 
under me, who bas carried me through many a 
worse place than this—we shall get along.” 
Here is a fair hit at national vanity, 
though nobody of common-sense depreciates 
the real advantages of American freedom :-— 
If a foreigner, in passing through our country, 
grasps at every occasion to make invidious com- 
parisons, sneering at its population, manners, and 
institutions, and extolling those of his own native 
land, nothing is said of national vanity. When 
it was determined in England to tear the “striped 
bunting” from the mast-heads of our “ fir-built 
frigates,” andto sweep the Yankee cock-boats 
from the ocean, “no national vanity was dis- 
played at all; when the very Review in question 
(Edinburgh) tell us that England is the bulwark 
of religion, the arbiter of the fates of kingdoms, 
the last refuge of freedom, there is uo national 
vanity in the business—not a spice. But ifa 
plain backwoodsman ventures to praise his own 
country, because he finds all his wants supplied, 
and his rights defended, while he is not pestered 
with tax-gatherers and excisemen, is not devoured 
by fox-hunting priests, pensioners, and paupers, 
sees no dragoons galloping about his cottage, and 
is allowed to vote for whom he pleases to repre- 
sent him—all of which he has good reason to be- 
lieve is ordered differently in another country— 
thisisa ‘‘disgusting display of national va- 
nity.” Ifhe ventures to exhibit a shattered limb, 
or a breast covered with scars, and to tell that he 
recived these honourable scars in defence of his 
native land, on an occasion when the “ best troops 
in the world” fied before the valour of undiscei- 
plined freemen, led by a Jackson or a Brown 
this is very disgusting. 
The fact is, that English travellers, and English 
people in general, who come among us, forget 
that the rest of the world are not as eredulous 
and gullible as themselves ; and are continually 
attempting to impose fictions upon us, which we 
refuse to credit. They seem not to be aware that 
we are a reading people, and wonld conyince us 
that they are a wise, valiant, and virtuous people, 
beloved and respected by all the world, while we 
are an ignorant idle set of boobies, for whom 
nobody cares a farthing. They tell us how happy 
and comfortable every body is in England, and 
what a poor, forlorn, forsaken, miserable set we 
are, who have had the misfortune to be born in @ 
new country, and never saw a king, a lord, or a 
hangman. One of them told me that he had neyer 
heard of the battle of New Orleans, until he came 
to America several years after it was fought, and 
that the British nation had hardly ever heard of 
the war with America. Now, when we refuse to 
credit these things, and flatly deny them, as we 
often do, we are sct down as a conceited, vain 
people, who presume to think for ourselves, and 
to believe that we know something, when a prating 
renegade or a venal reviewer shall pronounce us 
fuols. Jolin Bull forgets that his own vanity isa 
source of merriment with the rest of the world. 
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