The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called _Western Adventure_, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. I have wondered often since who wrote or compiled that book; we had printed it ourselves in D----, from the stereotype plates of some temporary publisher whose name is quite lost to me. This book, and _Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio_, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made our State a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our own life in the log-cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade;” of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day with undaunted spirits. With our native romance I sometimes mingled with my own reading a strain of old-world poetry, and “Hamet el Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio. VIII When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cut-worms which swarmed in the upturned sod. I have no recollection of really enjoying any of the visionary red-cores and white-cores which had furnished us a Barmecide feast when we planted their seed, and so I suppose none of them grew. But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear their slopes of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length. Neither could the cornfield beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.