For Captain Stuart had encountered a difficulty in these simple backwoods Christmas festivities which was altogether unexpected. He had diligently considered the odds against success, in which, however, the chief seemed the lack of appropriate refreshment, for one could not serve venison and buffalo and wild fowl to hunters as luxuries, and the limited compass and utilitarian character of the goods sent from the base of supplies over the mountains rendered even the accumulation of the requisite materials for the punch-bowl a matter of forethought and skilled strategy. After the wheat-bread had been secured to make the ramequins this feature came near to being dropped because of the difficulty of obtaining the simple ingredients of eggs and cheese to compound the farce wherewith they should be spread. But this too had been accomplished. The method of providing for the safety and entertainment of the children of the settlers, without whom they could not leave home yet whose presence would have hindered if not destroyed the enjoyment of the elders, seemed a stroke of genius. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers were satisfactorily assigned a share in the entertainment appropriate to their military rank and in consonance with their taste, and were even now carousing gayly in their quarters, where there was more Christmas spirit in circulation than spirituous liquor, for the commandant's orders were niggardly indeed as to serving out the portions of tafia, not in the interests of temperance so much as of discipline in view of their perilous situation so far from help, so alone in the midst of hordes of inimical savages; his parsimony in this regard passed with them as necessity, since they knew that rum was hard to come by, and even this meager dole was infrequent and a luxury. Therefore they drank their thimbleful with warm hearts and cool heads; the riotous roared out wild songs and vied with one another in wrestling matches or boxing encounters; the more sedate played cards or dominoes close in to the light of the flaring fire, or listened with ever fresh interest to the great stories often told by the gray-headed drum-major who had served under the Duke of Cumberland in foreign lands, and promptly smote upon the mouth any man who spoke of his royal highness as "Billy the Butcher";[8] for there were Scotchmen in the garrison intolerant of the title of "Hero of Culloden," having more or less remote associations with an experience delicately mentioned in Scotland as "being out in the Forty-five." With each fresh narration the drum-major produced new historical details of the duke's famous fields and added a few to the sum of the enemies killed and wounded, till it seemed that if the years should spare him, it would one day be demonstrated that the warlike William Augustus had in any specified battle slain more men by sword and bayonet and good leaden ball than were ever mustered into any army on the face of the earth. All the