[A LOYAL TRAITOR.]
A STORY OF THE WAR OF 1812 BETWEEN AMERICA AND ENGLAND.
BY JAMES BARNES.
CHAPTER VII.
HARDSHIPS.
Now behold the third attempt that I have made to condense this part of my narrative.
In desperation, for I wish to push on, I have adopted the measure of giving but an outline of my personal history covering two years.
So I jump to a day in June, after I had been living in the little house on Mountain Brook some seven months.
During this time I had been to Miller's Falls but once with my uncle, but so insolently was I stared at that I did not care to withstand again the ordeal of pointed fingers and the whispered conversations of the curious. But now on this June day, here I was standing at the edge of the pasture waiting for some one most impatiently.
From the door-step of Belair but one other dwelling was in sight; except this, nothing but ranges of hill-tops. But a mile below lived a farmer named Tanner, who managed by hard labor to gain his living from the ground. But I was not waiting for him, nor for my uncle, nor for Gaston, who, by-the-way, had been constituted, or had appointed himself, my guardian to such an extent that I might at times, with no stretching of the imagination, consider myself a prisoner. No, I was not waiting for any of them, but for some one who soon hove in sight across the slope of the opposite hill. It was a little girl of my own age, and the only living being at that time who knew anything of my thoughts or life; and they were both strange enough for a boy of fifteen to possess or to endure.