In the second volume, our hero again visits “the Oaks,” and while standing by the bed side of his dying sister, is informed that Proctor, with a company of soldiers, has arrived; he refuses to fly at first, but at last escapes from the window, is pursued, and nearly taken, but escapes, and the next moment meets Col. Walton with a troop, the Colonel having been forced to take up arms for or against his country: they turn, take Proctor, let him go; and the next day our hero goes to join Marion, while Col. Walton joins Gates; and on his way, Singleton surprises Gaskens, a tory leader, with his party; Gates refusing to accept the proffered aid of Marion, the latter General, with our hero, departs; the battle is fought, Col. Walton taken, and carried to Dorchester, to be tried and executed, but is rescued at the scaffold by Singleton, who thus wins cousin Kate, and marries her _we suppose_, for the author leaves us in the dark as to the “consummation most devoutly to be wished for.” This is the outline, and we will now examine parts more minutely. The author, in the first thirty pages, proceeds to introduce the hero to the reader, in the bar-room of the “Royal George” at Dorchester, which “belongs to Ashley no longer,” and gives a tedious account of sundry _bullyings_ and threats, between the two rivals, Sergeant Hastings and John Davis, a doughty Goose-creeker, which ended without many blows, thanks to the benign influence of the pretty bar maid, whose influence seems directly the reverse of the heifer in Virgil’s Comparison. The next thirty pages bring our hero to the swamp, and on the ride thither, Humphries gives a learned disquisition upon the manner of building causeways through the swamp, which he proves most conclusively should be built with a “back bone,” and logs placed “up and down the road.” In the following, we have a description of some twenty men, who are under arms in the swamp. “The gloomy painter would have done much with the scene before them,” says our author. Would that the gloomy painter _had_ done it, or some one, who would have done more in fewer words. It is a fault with this author, as it is with all who have a lack of genius or vivid imagination, that, instead of seizing upon the prominent and striking points in a scene, and sketching them with a bold hand, leaving the picture to be filled out by the awakened imagination of the reader, he tires, by giving minute descriptions of every tree, grape vine, and pool of water, and the appearance and position of each individual, as if all-important to the “story,” as well as to the mind of the reader. As the surprize of the tories is the first thing like an incident, that we find in the work, although we are through with half of the first volume, was this one of even common interest, it should be here transcribed, but it is too prolix, and the most of it is the chase of Frampton, the maniac, after a hang-man tory corporal, who at length became dreadfully