Se-quo-yah was now in comparatively easy circumstances. Besides
his cattle, his store, and his farm, he was a blacksmith and a
silversmith. In spite of all that has been alleged about Indian
stupidity and barbarity, his countrymen were proud of him. He was
in danger of shipwrecking on that fatal sunken reef to American
character, popularity. Hospitality is the ornament, and has been
the ruin, of the aborigine. His home, his store, or his shop,
became the resort of his countrymen; there they smoked and talked,
and learned to drink together. Among the Cherokees those who have
are expected to be liberal to those who have not; and whatever
weaknesses he might possess, niggardliness or meanness was not
among them.

After he had grown to man's estate he learned to draw. His
sketches, at first rude, at last acquired considerable merit. He
had been taught no rules of perspective; but while his perspective
differed from that of a European, he did not ignore it, like the
Chinese. He had now a very comfortable hewed-log residence, well
furnished with such articles as were common with the better class
of white settlers at that time, many of them, however, made by
himself.

Before he reached his thirty-fifth year he became addicted to
convivial habits to an extent that injured his business, and began
to cripple his resources. Unlike most of his race, however, he did
not become wildly excited when under the influence of liquor.

Se-quo-yah, who never saw his father, and never could utter a word
of the German tongue, still carried, deep in his nature, an odd
compound of Indian and German transcendentalism; essentially