136 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



bit of paper with the usual IJ and with the Latin for whiskey, 

 "spiritus frumenti," adding thereto a trifle of iron oxide. This 

 prescription was at once filled. 



Stopping over night at a little inn in Andover, on the way 

 into the wilderness, I found an old man seated by the fire in the 

 public room. He asked me whence I came, and on learning that 

 it was from Cambridge, near Boston, he said that he had been 

 there, but that it was quite a while ago. I asked when it was, 

 and learned that it was on the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, 

 when he was a lad. He had nothing to do with the fighting, but 

 seemed to retain a clear memory of the battle and the anxiety 

 of the people in the village. Although in my boyhood I had 

 seen men who claimed to have been soldiers in the Revolution- 

 ary campaigns and to have fought at Cowpens, King's Mountain, 

 and Yorktown, this was the only ancient I ever encountered 

 who had memories of the earlier stages of the Revolution. 



In the then conditions of transportation in the Urnbagog 

 country we had to have a guide and pack our camp effects and 

 canoe over portages. Our guide was a half-breed, a drinking 

 fellow, who proved very insolent at the outset of our journey 

 with him. We came to bettered relations through a trifling 

 incident. In packing over a carry, he in the lead, a spruce 

 partridge stood in the path, so that he halted, looking at it. I 

 saw my chance to show him that we were not so green as we 

 looked, and with a small revolver which he did not know I had, 

 I fired at the bird and killed it; the bullet went within half a 

 foot or so of the brute's ear. There was no risk of harming him, 

 for I was so close that the shot could not go wild. He walked on, 

 picked up the bird, and put it in his pocket; did not even look 

 at me, but was afterwards very friendly. It was not that he 

 was frightened that he became more amiable; the fact that I 

 had shot by his head and hit the mark put me in the class of 

 respectable persons those who knew something of the wilder- 

 ness and its ways. A part of the rather absurd but effective 

 training of the lads with whom I had been brought up was to 



