was mainly a young men's and boys' affair, Putnam himself being only
twenty-four at the time, and the wolf having been traced to her lair by
young John Sharp, a boy of seventeen.

The slayer of the old she-wolf was the hero of the time; but he bore his
laurels modestly, though exaggerated accounts of the affair were
published all over the colonies, and even in England, where they were
exploited in the public prints. By rising to the occasion, and doing the
right thing at the right time, he acquired a reputation for valor and
firmness that stood him in good stead in those coming conflicts, the
Seven Years' War and the Revolution.

Unknown to him, however, and unsuspected, were the heights to which he
subsequently rose. He devoted himself to his farm, becoming the best
agriculturist in the region in which he lived, and also performed the
duties of a good citizen, never shrinking from his share of civic
burdens. The youth of to-day could not do better than emulate the
example of this illustrious American; and they might do worse than take
part in the patriotic pilgrimages annually made to the scenes of his
early life. The citizens of his adopted State have religiously preserved
intact the second house he built in Brooklyn, then Pomfret; and the
she-wolf's den may still be seen, in the side of a wooded hill. The
entrance-way is at present too low and narrow to admit the passage of a
boy, much less of a full-grown man; but that is said to have been caused
by the falling in of the rocks, in the lapse of time since Putnam's day.




CHAPTER III