DRi and I | Page 2

month in the army, yet I have not before
seen a man who could handle horse and sword as if they were part of
him. He is a gentleman, also, and one after your own heart, I know, my
dear count, you will do everything you can to further the work intrusted
to him.

"Your obedient servant, "DARIUS HAWKINS."
From a letter of Joseph Bonaparte, Comte de Survilliers, introducing
his friend Colonel Ramon Bell to Napoleon III of France:--
"He has had a career romantic and interesting beyond that of any man I
have met in America. In the late war with England he was the master of
many situations most perilous and difficult. The scars of ten bullets and
four sabre-thrusts are on his body. It gives me great pleasure, my dear
Louis, to make you to know one of the most gallant and chivalrous of
men. He has other claims upon your interest and hospitality, with
which he will acquaint you in his own delightful way."

D'RI AND I
I
A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the
worst of fathers. Even as grandfather he is too near, for one poet can
lay a streak of poverty over three generations. Doubt not I know
whereof I speak, dear reader, for my mother's father was a poet--a
French poet, too, whose lines had crossed the Atlantic long before that
summer of 1770 when he came to Montreal. He died there, leaving
only debts and those who had great need of a better legacy--my mother
and grandmother.
As to my father, he had none of that fatal folly in him. He was a
mountaineer of Vermont--a man of steely sinews that took well to the
grip of a sword. He cut his way to fame in the Northern army when the
British came first to give us battle, and a bloody way it was. I have now
a faded letter from Ethan Allen, grim old warrior, in which he calls my
father "the best swordsman that ever straddled a horse." He was a
"gallous chap" in his youth, so said my grandmother, with a great love
of good clothes and gunpowder. He went to Montreal, as a boy, to be
educated; took lessons in fencing, fought a duel, ran away from school,
and came home with little learning and a wife. Punished by

disinheritance, he took a farm, and left the plough to go into battle.
I wonder often that my mother could put up with the stress and
hardship of his life, for she had had gentle breeding, of which I knew
little until I was grown to manhood, when I came to know also what a
woman will do for the love of her heart. I remember well those tales of
knights and ladies she used to tell me as we sat together of an evening,
and also those adventures of her own knight, my good father, in the war
with the British. My love of arms and of a just quarrel began then.
After the war came hard times. My father had not prospered
handsomely, when, near the end of the summer of 1803, he sold his
farm, and we all started West, over rough trails and roadways. There
were seven of us, bound for the valley of the St. Lawrence--my father
and mother, my two sisters, my grandmother, D'ri, the hired man, and
myself, then a sturdy boy of ten. We had an ox-team and -cart that
carried our provision, the sacred feather beds of my mother, and some
few other things.
[Illustration: D'Ri and I.]
We drove with us the first flock of sheep that ever went West. There
were forty of them, and they filled our days with trouble. But for our
faithful dog Rover, I fear we should have lost heart and left them to the
wild wolves. The cart had a low cover of canvas, and my mother and
grandmother sat on the feather beds, and rode with small comfort even
where the roads were level. My father let me carry my little pet rooster
in a basket that hung from the cart-axle when not in my keeping. The
rooster had a harder time than any of us, I fancy, for the days were hot
and the roads rough. He was always panting, with open mouth and
thoughtful eye, when I lifted the cover. But every day he gave us an
example of cheerfulness not wholly without effect. He crowed
triumphantly, betimes, in the hot basket, even when he was being
tumbled about on the swamp ways. Nights I always found a perch for
him on the limb of a near tree, above the reach of predatory creatures.
Every morning, as the dawn showed