When everybody but ourselves had left the starlit open place, Johnny Appleseed lay down and stretched his heels to the blaze. A soldier added another log, and kicked into the flame those fallen away. Though it was the end of July, Lake Erie cooled the inland forests. Sentinels were posted in the blockhouses. Quiet settled on the camp; and I sat turning many things in my mind besides the impending battle. Napoleon Bonaparte had made a disastrous campaign in Russia. If I were yet in France; if the Marquis du Plessy had lived; if I had not gone to Mittau; if the self I might have been, that always haunts us, stood ready to take advantage of the turn-- Yet the thing which cannot be understood by men reared under old governments had befallen me. I must have drawn the wilderness into my blood. Its possibilities held me. If I had stayed in France at twenty, I should have been a Frenchman. The following years made me an American. The passion that binds you to a land is no more to be explained than the fact that many women are beautiful, while only one is vitally interesting. The wilderness mystic was sitting up looking at me. "I see two people in you," he said. "Only two?" "Two separate men." "What are their names?" "Their names I cannot see." "Well, suppose we call them Louis and Lazarre." His eyes sparkled. "You are a white man," he pronounced. "By that I mean you are not stained with many vile sins." "I hadn't an equal chance with other men. I lost nine years." "Mebby," hazarded Johnny Appleseed cautiously, "you are the one appointed to open and read what is sealed." "If you mean to interpret what you read, I'm afraid I am not the one. Where did you get those leaves?" "From a book that I divided up to distribute among the people." "Doesn't that destroy the sense?" "No. I carry the pages in their order from cabin to cabin." He came around the fire with the lightness of an Indian, and gave me his own fragment to examine. It proved to be from the writings of one Emanuel Swedenborg. With a smile which seemed to lessen the size of his face and concentrate its expression to a shining point, Johnny Appleseed slid his leather bags along the rope girdle, and searched them, one after the other. I thought he wanted me to notice his apple seeds, and inquired how many kinds he carried. So he showed them in handfuls, brown and glistening, or gummed with the sweet blood of cider. These produced pippins; these produced russets; these produced luscious harvest apples, that fell in August bursting with juicy ripeness. Then he showed me another bagful which were not apple seeds at all, but neutral colored specks moving with fluid swiftness as he poured them from palm to palm. "Do you know what this is?" I told him I didn't. "It's dogfennel seed." I laughed, and asked him what kind of apples it bore. Johnny Appleseed smiled at me again.