A CHRISTMAS WITH "OLD PORT." 



RETURN OF THE WANDERER AND THE FEAST PORT TYLER 

 MADE IN HONOR OF THE "jAYHAWKER" STORIES 

 TOLD BY PORT, BILLY BISHOP, MAT MILLER AND 

 OTHERS UNTIL DAYLIGHT CAME THROUGH THE 

 WINDOWS. 



IT was not a bottle of "crusty Oporto," that celebrated 

 promoter of gout, that made this particular Christ- 

 mas a day to be remembered; but the "Old Port" 

 was none other than my dear old friend, Porter Tyler, 

 who figures frequently in this book; the same old bach- 

 elor, market gunner and trapper of Greenbush, N. Y., 

 whom I had left something over five years before to seek 

 sport in the West. 



It was the old story: A boy had spurned the parental 

 roof, and longed for adventure; had found it, and came 

 back under the ancestral shingles. Many weeks before 

 this I had gone the rounds of old friends, and shaken 

 hands; but I was not in physical shape to engage in our 

 usual sports of winter. The freshly-turned prairie sod 

 with its decaying vegetation had left more than what 

 some of the Kansas settlers called "a leetle tech o' ager." 

 But one day the mail at West Albany brought the fol- 

 lowing: 



"GREENBUSH, December 18, 1859. 



"You OLD JAYHAWKER: Old Port will serve a 'coon, with 

 all the trimmings, one week from to-night, the same being 



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