This consideration decided the matter, and away we went towards the ravine or glen, on the side of which stood the primitive-looking hut that went by the name of the "wigwam." The house was a small cabin of logs, neat and warm, or cool, as the season demanded. As it was kept up, and was whitewashed, and occasionally furnished anew by the landlord--the odious creature! he who paid for so many similar things in the neighbourhood--it was never unfit to be seen, though never of a very alluring, cottage-like character. There was a garden, and it had been properly made that very season, the negro picking and pecking about it, during the summer, in a way to coax the vegetables and fruits on a little, though I well knew that the regular weedings came from an assistant at the Nest, who was ordered to give it an eye and an occasional half-day. On one side of the hut there was a hog-pen and a small stable for a cow; but on the other the trees of the virgin forest, which had never been disturbed in that glen, overshadowed the roof. This somewhat poetical arrangement was actually the consequence of a compromise between the tenants of the cabin, the negro insisting on the accessories of his rude civilization, while the Indian required the shades of the woods to reconcile him to his position. Here had these two singularly associated beings--the one deriving his descent from the debased races of Africa, and the other from the fierce but lofty-minded aboriginal inhabitant of this continent--dwelt nearly for the whole period of an ordinary human life. The cabin itself began to look really ancient, while those who dwelt in it had little altered within the memory of man! Such instances of longevity, whatever theorists may say on the subject, are not unfrequent among either the blacks or the "natives," though probably less so among the last than among the first, and still less so among the first of the northern than of the southern sections of the republic. It is common to say that the great age so often attributed to the people of these two races is owing to ignorance of the periods of their births, and that they do not live longer than the whites. This may be true, in the main, for a white man is known to have died at no great distance from Ravensnest, within the last five-and-twenty years, who numbered more than his six score of years; but aged negroes and aged Indians are nevertheless so common, when the smallness of their whole numbers is remembered, as to render the fact apparent to most of those who have seen much of their respective people.