wilderness one hundred, it was hard to believe how little Henry
van Cortlandt knew of the woods and its life. He belonged to the
ultra-fashionable set, and it was rather their pose to affect
ignorance of the savage world and its ways. But he had plenty of
common-sense to fan back on, and the inspiring example of
Washington, equally at home in the nation's Parliament, the army
intrenchment, the glittering ball room, or the hunting lodge of
the Indian, was a constant reminder that the perfect man is a
harmonious development of mind, morals, and physique.

His training had been somewhat warped by the ultraclassic fashion
of the times, so he persisted in seeing in Quonab a sort of
discoloured, barbaric clansman of Alaric or a camp follower of
Xenophon's host, rather than an actual living, interesting,
native American, exemplifying in the highest degree the sinewy,
alert woodman, and the saturated mystic and pantheist of an age
bygone and out of date, combined with a middle-measure
intelligence. And Rolf, tall, blue-eyed with brown, curling
hair, was made to pose as the youthful Achilles, rather than as a
type of America's best young manhood, cleaner, saner, and of far
higher ideals and traditions than ever were ascribed to Achilles
by his most blinded worshippers. It recalled the case of
Wordsworth and Southey living side by side in England; Southey,
the famous, must needs seek in ancient India for material to
write his twelve-volume romance that no one ever looks at;
Wordsworth, the unknown, wrote of the things of his own time,
about his own door? and produced immortal verse.

What should we think of Homer, had he sung his impressions of the
ancient Egyptians? or of Thackeray, had he novelized the life of