Victor Chevillere could not expel from his imagination the image of the fair stranger. Again and again did he essay to join Lamar in his light and sprightly conversation, as they, on the day after the one recorded in the last chapter, pursued their journey along the noble turnpike between Fredericktown and Baltimore. The same profound revery would steal upon him, and abide until broken by the merry peals of Lamar's peculiarly loud and joyous laughter, at the new mood which seemed to have visited the former. When a young person first begins to experience these abstracted moods, there is nothing, perhaps, that sounds more harsh and startling to his senses, than the mirthful voice of his best friend. He looks up as one would naturally look at any unseemly or boisterous conduct at a funeral. He seems to gaze and wonder, for the first time, that all things and all men are jogging on at their usual gait. Thus were things moving upon the Fredericktown turnpike: Lamar riding forty or fifty paces in front, singing away the blue devils; Chevillere in the centre, moody and silent; and old Cato, stately as a statue on horseback, bringing up the rear. From hearing sundry merry peals of laughter from Lamar's quarter, Chevillere was induced at length to forego his own society for a moment, to see what new subject his Quixotic friend had found for such unusual merriment; and a subject he had indeed found in the shape of a tall Kentuckian. The name of the stranger, it seems, was Montgomery Damon. He was six feet high, with broad shoulders, full, projecting chest, light hair and complexion, and a countenance that was upon the first blush an index to a mind full of quaint, rude, and wild humour. His dress was any thing but fashionable; he wore a large, two-story hat, with a bandana handkerchief hanging out in front, partly over his forehead, as if to protect it from the great weight of his castor. His coat and pantaloons were of home-made cotton and woollen jeans, and he carried in his hand a warlike riding-whip, loaded with lead, and mounted with silver, with which, now and then, he gave emphasis to his words, by an unexpected and sonorous crack. Our Kentuckian was no quiet man; but, like most of his race, bold, talkative, and exceedingly democratic in all his notions; feeling as much pride in his occupation of drover, as if he had been a senator in Congress from his own "Kentuck," as he emphatically called it. He was a politician, too, inasmuch as he despised _tories_, as he called the federalists, approved of the late war, and had a most venomous hatred against Indians, of whatever tribe or nation. We shall break into their dialogue at the point at which Victor became a listener. "How did it happen," said Lamar, "that you did not join the army either of the north or south, when your heart seems to have been so entirely with them?"