cambric ruffles of shirts. As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his
wonderful experiences while in his master's service in London (although
he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with seeming
seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described the
life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen
the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of London
that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the
incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who
continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth
escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people,
had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond
measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those
sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War,
might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a venturesome
Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to afford any
interest in the present or glamour in the past.

It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the
Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several
minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the
attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders,
the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered
frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at
Long Cane and some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first
Montgomerie and then Grant made their furious forays through the
Cherokee country. Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment,
eagerly coveted a commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to
speak. Now that the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,--that is,
exhausted, decimated, their towns burned, their best and bravest slain,
their hearts broken,--the fugitives from this settlement on the