194 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



character, sure enough, and just such an one you will meet 

 with nowhere else in the world hut in Kentucky ; and even 

 there it is nearly grown out hy this time. A more loyal, 

 gentle and generous spirit never lived, nor did a truer heart 

 beat ever in the broad, roomy chest of a lion-man. He was 

 as merrily reckless as a prodigious flow of physical energies, 

 mirthful instincts, and indomitable courage could make him. 

 He always took sides with the weak, it mattered not to him 

 what the odds of the oppressor, or how strange both parties 

 might be to him. He carried this feeling to amusing ex- 

 tremes in the defence of domestic animals ; and many the 

 scrape he has got into by taking the part of a poor horse or 

 dog that was being cruelly beaten by a drunken beast of a 

 master. He would never pass such a scene without stopping 

 it, at all hazards to himself; he would never see a negro beaten, 

 and never struck his own, but resented it as a personal injury 

 to himself if another did. This man was the most passion- 

 ately devoted to the chase of any one I had ever yet met with. 

 His father had been very wealthy, and at the time he grew 

 up, at Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, the chase was the 

 one fashionable and absorbing pursuit of the young men of 

 his social rank. The greater part of his life was thus spent 

 in the saddle ; and a passion cultivated from boyhood is not 

 easily shaken off in early manhood, particularly one so fasci- 

 nating. Suffice it, he kept a splendid pack of hounds, the 

 genealogy of every one of which he had at his tongue's end ; 

 and some fine hunters in his stable ; and for years after I knew 

 him — when he moved to the south — near my native town — 

 he spent fully one-third of his time, night and day, in the 

 woods on horseback following his hounds. He, too, was a 

 genuine lover of Nature, and preferred to hunt alone. Charlie 

 was indeed the very impersonation of a class of gay, dashing, 

 reckless and accomplished sportsmen of the north of Kentucky, 

 which is now nearly extinct. Whether, mounted on his tall 

 and powerful hunter, that seemed almost a miracle of indomi- 



