"_Brother_ Smith--who's he? I know _Charles_ Smith; and if you kin fellowship him, I can't. An' when you come to sift folks down,--as I foresee sich as you will,--you won't brother him much, unless he repints--an' I don't say he won't. Now let me introduce you to your future home, ef you settles in these parts. There, _this_ is the town, where we now are;" and he placed the tip of his little finger on the place as represented on the map. "Now coming down square on to the town-site is this eighty-acre lot; lays beautiful to the town, the main street running right up to it. And through that street," continued he, impressively, "must go all the travel to the important places beyond. And by and by, when the immigration gets strong enough, the owner of that piece of land will hev corner lots and sich to sell. Let me show jist how it lays;" and crossing the bridge, and passing up the projected street, he stopped the horses on a gentle rise of ground, forming the nearest point in the eighty acres. "There," he continued, referring to the map again, "you see the eighty-acre lot runs lengthwise from the town. Across it runs a tributary of the river--just down there where you see the plum and bass-wood trees; and beyond that are ten acres of the richest and easiest-worked river bottom that the sun ever shone on--all fenced; then follers thirty acres of young and valuable timber land. Here's your building spot right here where we stand, in sight of everybody, and all the travel, handy to the store, and saw-mill, and post-office, and sich, and handy to meetin'; and the ten acres of alluvial, rich as the richest, and finely pulverized as powder,--you ken plough it or hoe it jist as easy as you ken turn your hand over,--will give you all the sarce you want, and something to sell. And there's wood enough down over the place to keep yer fires a going; and when you want to pre-empt, jist sell some of yer standing timber there, to help pay for the whole, at government price." "But," replied the missionary, as the squatter finished his graphic description, "I see by this chart that this is taken up;" for he had meanwhile been examining it. "Well," said the hunter, "whose name's writ down as the owner of this land?" "Henry Simonds," said the minister, reading from the paper.