Only picture to yourself, gentle reader, how I must have felt, alone in this unhallowed wilderness, without friend or white man within hundreds of miles of me, and surrounded by savages who had never seen a white man before. Every day seemed a week, every night a month. I pined, I languished, my head turned gray, and in a brief space ten years were added to my age. Yet man is born to endure, and my only consolation was in my Bible. The first thing I did after my friends left me, was to patch up the house a little, and put the few goods I had, so tempting to Indians, into a kind of cellar which I made in the middle of the house. This done, I set to in earnest to learn the Indian language, and wrote vocabulary after vocabulary; and although the task was a hard one, I soon found, from my progress, that perseverance would overcome many difficulties. The novelty of white men, and particularly of a white man alone, drew crowds of inquisitive Indians about the place. I mixed with them, traded with them, and at last began to talk with them, and from a constant intercourse soon came to understand them; but still the evenings were long, and the winter dreary. Every night before going to bed I primed my gun and pistol anew, and barricaded the door of my lonely dwelling; and the Indians, {147} friendly inclined, always withdrew from the house at dusk; yet they had often alarms among themselves, and often gave me to understand that enemies, or ill-disposed Indians, were constantly lurking about; and whenever they began to whoop or yell in the night, which they frequently did, I of course partook of the alarm.