96 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



advanced in years, and though I do not exactly aflfect the 

 nimbleness of Cleopatra, who was seen to 



"Hop forty paces through the public street," 



yet I pretend to very respectable ambulatory powers. Though, 

 I say, I would not enter in a match with Gildersleeve, Col. 

 Stannard, Kit North, John Neal, or anybody else who has 

 pedestrinated himself into an Olympic Crown ; yet I do set 

 up to be a walker, and I was not a little confounded at seeing 

 this old man leave me, panting to the leeward. 



His physical energies seemed entirely unimpaired. Another 

 striking evidence of this he gave me. A number of us were 

 standing grouped around him, on the top of the boat, one 

 clear sunshiny morning ; we were at the same time passing 

 through a broken and very picturesque region ; his keen eyes, 

 with an abstracted, intense expression, an expression of looking 

 over the heads of men around him, out into nature, peculiar 

 to them, were glancing over the scenery as we glided through, 

 when suddenly he pointed with his finger towards the fence 

 of a field, several hundred yards ofi", with the exclamation, — 



" See ! yonder is a Fox Squirrel, running along the top 

 rail ! It is not often I have seen them in Pennsylvania !" 



Now his power of vision must have been singularly acute, 

 to have distinguished that it was a Fox Squirrel at such a 

 distance ; for only myself and one other person out of a dozen 

 or two, who were looking in the same direction, detected the 

 creature at all, and we could barely distinguish that there 

 was some object moving on the rail. I asked him curiously, 

 if he was sure of its being a Fox Squirrel. He smiled, and 

 flashed his hawk-like glance upon me, as he answered ; 



" Ah, I have an Indian's eye !" And I had only to look into 

 it to feel that he had. 



These are slight but peculiar traits, in perfect keeping with 

 his general characteristics, as the naturalist and the man. 

 Of course, I never permitted that acquaintance to fall through, 



