It was a glorious region of stately woods, fertile valleys, clear running streams, and lofty mountains, where our young surveyor, with the exception of the winter months, spent the next three years of his life. At first, not being accustomed to such severe privations and exposure, it had gone rather hard with him: but he soon became inured to them; and it was, no doubt, to this rough experience in the wilderness, that he owed, in large measure, his uncommon vigor and activity of body, and that firm reliance on the resources of his own mind, which enabled him to endure and overcome those hardships, trials, and difficulties which beset him throughout the greater portion of his after-life. This severe training was also of another advantage to him, in making him perfectly familiar with all that region, in whose dark retreats and rugged wilds he learned, a few years later, his first hard lessons in the art of war. With all its privations, it was a life he loved to lead; for it afforded him the means of an independent support: and a happy boy was he, when first he wrote his mother that he was earning from fifteen to twenty dollars for every day he worked. Besides this, the beauty and grandeur of Nature's works, everywhere visible around him, awakened in him feelings of the truest delight; and he would sometimes spend the better part of a summer's day in admiring the tall and stately trees, whose spreading branches were his only shelter from the dews of heaven, and heat of noonday. At night, after supper, when his companions would be talking over the adventures of the day just past, or laughing boisterously at some broad joke repeated for the hundredth time, or would be joining their voices in the chorus of some rude woodland song, our young surveyor would be sitting a little apart on the trunk of a fallen tree, pencil and paper before him, calculating with a grave countenance, and by the ruddy light of a blazing pine-knot, the results of the day's labor. With no other companionship than that of the wild Indians he fell in with from time to time, and the rude, unlettered hunters around him, he must needs turn for society to the thoughts that stirred within his own mind. Often would he withdraw himself from the noisy mirth of his companions, and, climbing to some lofty mountain-top, spend hours and hours rapt in the contemplation of the wild and varied region, smiling in life and beauty far, far beneath him. At such times, we can imagine his countenance lit up with a sacred joy, and his soul rising in praise and thanksgiving to the great Father, who, in love and wisdom, made this glorious world for the good and happiness of all that dwell therein.