A hard, hard necessity must it have been which could have forced the poor, hunted wanderers of the wilderness to fly for refuge and protection from the talons and beak of the eagle to the claws and teeth of the lion. It was but a change, and made with but little hope of its being for the better. None saw this more clearly, felt it more deeply, than the sagacious Tecumseh; and his proud spirit groaned under the humiliating thought that after all he and his warriors were not viewed as allies having an equal interest in the result of the struggle going on, but rather as instruments merely, which might be made useful to the purpose in hand, then dropped. To use his own expression: "They were but a pack of starved hounds, hallooed upon the Americans by the English." Along the Northern lakes and rivers full many a battle had been fought--on a small scale, it is true, but bloody and ugly enough, especially to the Americans, who up to this time had usually been the worsted party. But now the fortunes of war were beginning to turn in our favor. Perry had won his brilliant little naval victory over the English fleet on Lake Erie, and had written to the Secretary of the Navy with Caesar-like conciseness: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours!" By land, too, the British had been met and beaten back at every point, till now they were without a foothold on the disputed territory--the hereditary lands. But, true to himself, true to the now quite hopeless cause for which he had labored and fought so long, the magnanimous sachem still kept his faith with the great father unbroken and inviolable, while the great father was immensely less concerned that he had failed to restore the hereditary lands to his red allies than that he had failed to wrest the disputed territory from his white enemies. So the little English king went on sipping his dainty wines in his marble palace over yonder on the other side of the globe, and took no further thought of the great Indian sachem who was breaking his heart over here in the wilderness of America, as true to his ally as had he been a Christian, baptized by an apostolic successor into the Church of England. But to make another start toward the end of our story. The English people, like the majority of mankind, are a good enough people in a general way, and in a general way, like those of most nations, their soldiers are brave enough. Good people, yet they have had their bad rulers--the great father, for example; and their brave soldiers have had their cowardly leaders--for example, General Proctor; concerning whom we must now say something--a very little; the least possible.