96 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
advanced in years, and though I do not exactly affect the 
nimbleness of Cleopatra, who was seen to 
“Hop forty paces through the public street,” 
yet I pretend to very respectable ambulatory powers. Th ugh, 
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 s:eing 
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 wer) 
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 kee. 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 gli cd through, 
when suddenly he pointed with his finger towards the fence 
of a field, several hundred yards off, 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 Sq irrel 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 hi~ curiously, 
if he was sure of its being a Fox Squirrel. He smiled, and 
flashed his hawk-like glance upon me, as he a: swered ; 
“ 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, 
