If you ask it, she will take down the great key from its nail, and swinging back the new doors of the meeting-house, will show you the old worm-eaten ones inside, which, pierced through and through with bullet-holes, once served as a rampart against the enemy. And she will tell you, in the quaint Friend's language, how her great-great-grandmother carried, over a hundred years ago, the news of the danger of her countrymen to Washington, on the Brandywine, and at the risk of her own life saved theirs.
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Some two decades ago thousands were reading about the highly romantic career of Charles Brandon in When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), and other thousands were applauding Julia Marlowe's impersonation of the beautiful and fascinating Princess Mary in the dramatic version of that book. The author was Charles Major (1856-1913), an Indiana lawyer turned novelist, who wrote, also, the equally romantic story of Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1902). Between these two pieces of delightful romance, he wrote a series of sketches of pioneer life in Indiana under the title of The Bears of Blue River (1901). It is an account of boy life in the early days, full of dramatic interest, simply written, and entirely worthy of the high place which it has already taken among stories of its type. The first adventure in that book follows by special arrangement with the publishers. (Copyright. The Macmillan Company, New York.)
THE BIG BEAR
CHARLES MAJOR
Away back in the "twenties," when Indiana was a baby state, and great forests of tall trees and tangled underbrush darkened what are now her bright plains and sunny hills, there stood upon the east bank of Big Blue River, a mile or two north of the point where that stream crosses the Michigan road, a cozy log cabin of two rooms—one front and one back.
The house faced the west, and stretching off toward the river for a distance equal to twice the width of an ordinary street, was a blue-grass lawn, upon which stood a dozen or more elm and sycamore trees, with a few honey-locusts scattered here and there. Immediately at the water's edge was a steep slope of ten or twelve feet. Back of the house, mile upon mile, stretched the deep dark forest, inhabited by deer and bears, wolves and wildcats, squirrels and birds, without number.
In the river the fish were so numerous that they seemed to entreat the boys to catch them, and to take them out of their crowded quarters. There were bass and black suckers, sunfish and catfish, to say nothing of the sweetest of all, the big-mouthed redeye.
South of the house stood a log barn, with room in it for three horses and two cows; and enclosing this barn, together with a piece of ground, five or six acres in extent, was a palisade fence, eight or ten feet high, made by driving poles into the ground close together. In this enclosure the farmer kept his stock, consisting of a few sheep and cattle, and here also the chickens, geese, and ducks were driven at nightfall to save them from "varmints," as all prowling animals were called by the settlers.
The man who had built this log hut, and who lived in it and owned the adjoining land at the time of which I write, bore the name of Balser Brent. "Balser" is probably a corruption of Baltzer, but, however that may be, Balser was his name, and Balser was the hero of the bear stories which I am about to tell you.