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mountain scenery, and one morning's exercise in such animating sport as is de. scribed in the following extract. With his guide the author has been to see the picturesque "Falls of the Sugartown Fork," and has just surmounted a very steep ascent formed by the mountains so closing in as to leave only a very narrow pass for the brawling stream," when we commence our extract:

"As we turned to descend-"We must take a salmon home with us for dinner," said Mr. McDonnald.

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"Indeed I am not," said Mr. McDonald, deliberately seating himself by the side of the stream we had regained, and pulling off his coat, shoes and stockings, and rolling up his pantaloons and shirt sleeves.

In a moment more he was in the water, turning over the large rocks, with as much earnestness as if he had expected to find a bag of gold beneath each of them. I looked on, puzzled what to think of my new acquaintance. At length he succeeded in slightly shaking a very large rock, which defied all his efforts to turn it over, when instantly there dashed from beneath it what, at first, appeared to me to be a perfect monster. Mr. McDonald immediately rushed in pursuit, and a more amusing spectacle I never witnessed for twelve or fifteen minutes. The water was splashed about in every direction, so as to leave not a dry garment upon the pursuer, as a large fish darted from one hiding place to another, with fruitless efforts to avail himself of it. Sometimes the hand of the extraordinary fisherman was fairly upon him, but the lubricity of his scales would save him, and afford him another chance for escape. At lengh, however, when nearly exhausted with his bootless exertions, Mr. McDonald succeeded in dexterously thrusting his hand into the gills of the fish, which now lashed the water into a perfect foam, and sent the spray in every direction, like a shower of rain. But the relentless foe held on with tenacious grasp and dragged him to the shore." As it professes, this book is a tale of the time of the late war-the opening being laid shortly before it broke out. The principal scenes are laid in that part of North Carolina called the 'Cherokee nation.'

The action commences with the description of the family of Robert Aymor, one of the pioneers of the wilds. His daughter Atha is loved by John Welsh, a halfbreed, saved when a child by one of Aymor's neighbors during one of the earlier Indian skirmishes. Her father will not consent to their union owing to the Indian blood in his veins, and his love drives him from that part of the country-he goes to the Indian country and becomes the adopted son of an old chief. An awkward combination of circumstances makes him the slayer of an Indian, and he is compelled to fly, and returns to Aymor's country, where he is followed by Eoneguski, as the avenger of the killed Indian. Eoneguski meets with Robert Aymor, who, in some earlier wars, had been taken prisoner by his father, Eonah, one of the chiefs of the Cherokees, but was by him saved. Eoneguski abandons his pursuit of Welsh, persuaded thereto by the story of the love of Atha Aymor and Welsh, told him by the son, Gideon Aymor. On returning, Eoneguski takes Gideon with him into the Indian country; where he finds his father much offended at his return without the scalp of Welsh. Eoneguski takes Gideon to a neighboring Indian village, where there lives Yenacona, another half-breed, who proves to be the mother of John Welsh, and with her lives her neice, Little Deer, who is the betrothed of Eoneguski. Gideon is left there; and partly by the aid of Yenacona, who is a christian, and partly by the aid of Thompson, an emissary of the British Government, to stir up the Indians, under the guise of a missionary, he succeeds in persuading the Little Deer into the desertion of Eoneguski, and then marries her himself. Previous to this the war breaks out, in which all the parties are involved. Aymor and Welsh meet at the battle of Tohopeka, of which there is a spirited account, and render some service to each other. Eonah, the father of Eoneguski, dies, and he succeeds him, notwithstanding the intrigues of a wily Indian, Chuheluh, who was also instrumental in causing John Welsh to slay the Indian, for which he was obliged to fly.

There is also an old Indian saga or prophet, whose previous history and present actions are closely connected with the principal characters of the book, especially

Yenacona. John Welsh is discovered by his mother, Yenacona, becomes one of the chiefs of the Cherokees, and is in the end married to Atha Aymor. Eoneguski, disappointed by the Little Deer, is never married, but devotes himself to the government of his people-and the rest of the plot is worked out as may expected.

As might be anticipated, a story such as this affords many opportunities for fine descriptive and narrative writing, of which the author, indeed, has not failed to avail himself, in proof of which we might instance the interview between Tecumseh, who has been introduced with signal effect, and Eoneguski, in the second volume page 155, and the battle already alluded to, where General Jackson drowned in blood the last remnant of the hostile Indians.

One thing is abundantly certain, that the present work is a first attempt at this species of composition, and it contains elements of power that a second trial may bring effectually into play. We trust the accomplished author will make this attempt and that the public will give him the best encouragement to do so, by their liberal patronage of the present effort.

THE MAINE

BOUNDARY

QUESTION.

AT length, after half a century of diplomatic "negotiation," there appears a prospect of an early settlement of this question; and it certainly affords a subject for sincere congratulation, not alone for the sake of the interest and honor of the State individually concerned, but for those of the Union at large. And that which a long array of stately diplomatists, each piling ream upon ream of official notes, ad infinitum, to make still worse confounded the confusion left by his predecessor, have been unable not merely to do, but even to approximate towards any reasonable prospect of doing, lo and behold, has been done, or all but done, with a few dashes of the pen, by a quiet, plain little man, of rather ordinary appearance, modest manner, and retiring habits, sallow complexion, good-natured countenance, and a peculiarly calm, steady eye-named JOHN FAIRFIELD, made Governor of the State of Maine by a bold, manly, and thinking people, because he was a staunch democrat, and a man of well approved sense, spirit, and firmness.

The right of Maine to the undisputed possession of the whole tract in dispute is as plain as the noonday sun in the heavens. The question does not rise, as has been said on the floor of the Senate, with the entire concurrence of all, to the dignity of debate. Ungracious as the assertion may seem from the one party to an unsettled question, the case is so extreme a one, that we must say that we cannot believe in the sincerity or good faith of any person, possessed of a decent modicum of intelligence, who, on looking at all into its merits, will profess to give the British claim the benefit of even a single doubt. This is strong language, but not stronger than we feel warranted by the truth in using, with all deliberation and confidence. We therefore have nothing here to say about the merits of the question further than to refer to the full exposition of it which may be found in our Number of last September.

We are not at all surprised that the patience of the State of Maine has become at last completely exhausted, and that she has determined not to permit the further indefinite procrastination of these interminable negotiations. The silence of the British Government through the past year, after the strong manifestations of public opinion in this country, through all its highest organs, proves, if any such proof were needed, that it is idle for us to expect from it for the future any better disposition for a fair and honorable settlement of the difficulty, than has been exhibited throughout all its past history. We cannot therefore withhold our full approval of the course she has adopted, so far as known at the date of the present remarks, as the only one fully equal to the circumstances of the case. A large armed and organized band of lawless intruders are upon a portion of the territory in dispute-a portion of

it over which American jurisdiction has been exercised as far back as thirty years ago. They are rapidly stripping it of that which constituted its chief value. The State sends promptly a civil officer, supported with an armed posse, to remove them, and arrest the dilapidation of the property unquestionably her own, and soon to be adjudged as such. It is violently resisted, and the officer arrested and imprisoned. The State rushes with its military force to the support of its civil officer in the function committed to him by the law. She is met by a claim on the part of the British authorities, advanced in a very arrogant manner, to exclusive jurisdiction over the whole territory in dispute, with a demand that all armed force shall be withdrawn, and the trespassers seized, be delivered over to the British jurisdiction for trial. This is the question on which, if on any, the collision is to take place-the British claim to exclusive jurisdiction pending the negotiations; and on this we think the right of the State perfectly clear. There can be no doubt that the President will be sustained by the unanimous approval of the country, in the determination declared by him to Congress, that, if this claim is maintained, and exercised by an armed occupation of the territory, he shall regard the case as arrived imposing upon him the constitutional duty to call out the militia to repel invasion. His language has all the moderation, with a sincere desire for peace and tranquillity, with at the same time that resolute combination of the fortiter in re with the suaviter in modo, alike characteristic of its author.

Some censure has been cast upon the course of Gov. Fairfield, as too precipitate and summary-in sending an armed force to the Aroostook, without previous consultation with either the Federal Government, or the Governor of New Brunswick. His object being to compel a speedy attention to, and settlement of, the case, and to exhibit the spirit which had been long and slowly mounting in the State, till it has reached a point at which it can no longer be possible to keep it down,—we think, on the contrary, that that course was the proper one; and that it will undoubtedly lead, by the shortest way, to the most satisfactory result. It should be borne in mind that the military power of the State was not sent to the support of the civil posse until after the proclamation of Sir John Harvey, claiming exclusive jurisdiction.

We have little apprehensions about the result. Sir John Harvey will not have ventured to attack the Maine troops, before the instructions from Washington will have reached him, which will doubtless put a peaceful end to the immediate difficulty. All parties will then retire. The object of the State will have been fully accomplished. Her equal right of jurisdiction will have been strongly asserted and stoutly maintained, and the arrogant and utterly unfounded adverse claim will have been successfully repelled;-while, as its most important consequence, the British Government will be for the first time within half a century awakened to the consciousness that the crisis of this most vexatiously procrastinated question has at length arrived, and that the State of Maine and the United States cannot, and will not, any longer submit to the cajolery of diplomacy heretofore so successfully played off against us by her adroit negotiators.

THE EXECUTIONS IN CANADA.

The most foul atrocities with which this part of our continent has ever been stain ed, taking into considerate connection all the facts and cireumstances of the case, are unquestionably the late British executions in our neighbour state of Canada. In the present age of the world, and the present maturity of the public mind to extinguish human life for political opinion is not a whit less infamous or revolting than it would be to revive the fires of Smithfield, and burn men, women and children for religious belief. It is impossible to apply to this case the justification of legal right.

The laws of England, which have been defiled by her monarchs with penalties for every crime, sanguinary as the code of Draco, authorize the penalty of death in unnumbered instances, where the daily practice of her Courts show that it is necessary for justice sake to preserve the life. The law of High Treason in particular; under which these hideous murders have been committed, is as old as the reign of Edward III, and ordains capital punishment for conspiring the death of the King! If the great Jefferson in the sincere respect of a philosophic lawgiver for the rights of posterity, and with a sacred deference to the progress of opinion, questioned the power and doubted the propriety of a legislature's enacting laws binding for more than one generation, what shall we think in our land and in an age subsequent to Jefferson, of the horrid criminality of these bloody executions in Canada, under a law some hundreds of years old and for an offence an American and a Republican cannot commit. No, the spirit of murder is essentially combined with the spirit of British Monarchy. The sanguinary selfishness of its fear of light, truth, justice and patriotism, has traced its long long career in the pages of British history in the best blood of its own land—and it is not to be borne that the monster appetite is now to be satiated with American and Republican victims. We say American without especial reference to the natives of the United States who perished at its bidding, but also of the more friendless Canadians, natives of the same soil, children of the same sun, and inheriting the same sympathies and associations as ourselves.

We attach no blame to the People of England for these atrocities. Their influence, wherever it has found its way into the legislation of their country, has been-like that of the people in all countries-uniformly beneficial, enlightened, and humane. The influence of her Monarchy has been, on the contrary, as uniformly bad, and its elements of evil, accelerated with all the impetus of power and energy, have, unhappily for a large portion of mankind, gone so much farther, as her history records, in the infusion of crime and guilt, and the adulteration of the good, arising from the opposing influence, that the British system-whether of politics or of legislation, has been rendered a compound monster, in which the darkness greatly predominates over the light, and whose operation has been almost uniformly maleficent on the destinies of the human race wherever it has been tried. We have not now space or heart to enumerate the holocaust of illustrious names comprising the brightest and the best of Britains' children, which has been sacrificed to appease and comfort this Moloch of her Monarchy.

What a noble army of martyrs, yet and that soon, to be honored as they deserve, would not these names compose; from the Cobhams and Balls of her early history, to the Russells and Sidneys, or Emmets and Lounts of her modern annals, whose fame will shine in brightness undiminished, when the loathing and wrath of aroused and free opinion shall have prostrated forever the system that destroyed them, because it could not exist in the same age with so much of purity and worth. The inexpressible indignation and disgust which the perpetration of these atrocities in this hemis phere has occasioned throughout the whole length and breadth of this land—where public opinion is so free and healthy, that it may be said to resemble the voice of posterity, may image forth the reaction of that tide of virtuous feeling that ere long will swell up in a strength that will at once atone and avenge the whole. Yes! let it go forth.-Never, never will the loathing which the judicial murders of these hapless Canadians has attached, in all enlightened opinion, to the British Monarchy be effaced, nor the indignant abhorrence they have excited, subside until a power thus disgustingly alien to the feelings, the interests, and the sympathies as well as the soil of freemen, shall have been utterly expelled from the broad expanse of the North American continent, whose free soil its odious and cruel policy has thus foully polluted.

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THE Twenty-Fifth Congress has come and gone. It has been a violent, embittered, and factious one; and it has exhibited many a scene which can afford very little satisfaction to the sincere lover of his country and her institutions to contemplate or to recur to. But it is gone, with its good and its evil, to take its place in history -with all its aspirations of dishonest ambition, all its little interests, all its passions, its intrigues, its treacheries, its crimes-together, too, with all the features of a brighter character which it may also have exhibited. Through all the stormy excitements of the hour, the wheel of time has still rolled swiftly and steadily on; and now, as we look back upon the history of the last two years-like a distant view of an agitated expanse of water-while the tossing froth of its waves is no longer distinguished in the broader scope of vision which the eye takes in, and the murmur of their fretful dashing can no longer reach the ear, the fixed rocks of great principles, planted firmly in the midst and towering high above, arrest the attention only the more distinctly and the more strikingly, than they could before. We propose to take a rapid review of this period. The contrast between its commencement and its close will be found pregnant with valuable political instruction.

There have been three sessions of the Twenty-Fifth Congress. Throughout the whole, the Administration has been in real minority in the lower, and in majority in the upper House-reversing the relative positions of parties during a portion of the previous Administration. Nothing has therefore been done on the great question which has now, like the rod of Aaron, swallowed up every minor one, the Divorce of Bank and State. It has been a period of transition, of preparation, of discussion, previous to the final settlement of the public opinion, which will develope itself in action, by establishing a permanent fiscal system for the country, at the next Congress

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