the ice, when the tract was first surveyed under the Indian grant."
"It sames to me, Natty, but a sorry compliment, to call your cumrad after the evil one," said the landlady; "and it's no much like a snake that old John is looking now. Nimrood would be a more besaming name for the lad, and a more christian too, seeing that it comes from the Bible. The Sargeant read me the chapter about him, the night before my christening, and a mighty asement it was, to listen to any thing from the book."
"Old John and Chingachgook were very different men to look on," returned the hunter, shaking his head at his melancholy recollections.—"In the 'fifty-eighth war,' he was in the middle of manhood, and was taller than now by three inches. If you had seen him, as I did, the morning we beat Dieskau, from behind our log walls, you would have called him as comely a red-skin as ye ever set eyes on. He was naked, all to his breech-cloth and leggens; and you never seed a creater so handsomely painted. One side of his face was red, and the other black. His head was shaved clean, all to a few hairs on the crown, where he wore a tuft of eagle's feathers, as bright as if they had come from a peacock's tail. He had coloured his sides, so that they looked just like an atomy, ribs and all; for Chingachgook had a great notion in such things: so that, what with his bold, fiery countenance, his knife, and his tomahawk, I have never seed a fiercer warrior on the ground. He played his part, too, like a man; for I seen him next day, with thirteen scalps on his pole. And I will say that for the 'Big Snake,' that he always dealt fair, and never scalped any that he didn't kill with his own hands."
"Well, well," cried the landlady; "fighting is fighting, any way, and there's different fashions
