THE HYPOCHONDRIAC.

AN INCIDENT OF WAYNE'S VICTORY.

AMONG the early settlers of Western Pennsylvania were several Highland families, and naturally enough where there were Highland men, there were Campbells. One of them, Arthur Campbell, the son of" old man Arthur," who lived in Alleghany County, is the hero of our sketch.

The boy was as active, strong, and intelligent as the descendant of mountaineers, himself a dweller among mountains, ought to be. No summer field of grass or wheat, no winter forest of massive trunks that were to be chopped and split into fire-wood, no wild-cat of the hills, nor fish of the stream, could tire out or elude him. He was early trained to follow the beasts of the wilderness, and to track its wild savages to their wigwams. His childhood was amused with tales of the days of Braddock, and his youth instructed by the study of the frontier campaigns of Washington, Armstrong, and Bouquet. At sixteen, no keener. scout, no stouter wood-chopper, no bolder hunter, was to be found about the Salt Springs of the Kiskiminitas, than the young Scotch Highlander. But Arthur was too ambitious to rest content with even the renown that filled a county. He had heard of Boone and the pioneers of Kentucky; he had read of the exploits of George Rogers Clark in the far

Northwest; and when at Pittsburg, in the winter of 178788, he had seen and talked with some of the first settlers of Marietta, who were then busy at "Sumrill's," on the Youghiogeny, building the boats which were to convey them, when spring opened, to the vast regions of the Ohio, which the whites had as yet spared. His imagination and his vanity were both excited to the highest point, and he longed to make himself known, as Logan, and Clark, and Putnam were known already. Under these impulses, young Arthur, in the spring of 1788, about the time he supposed Putnam's band would be descending the river, determined to take his rifle and knife, and make his way by land to the mouth of the Muskingum, and rejoiced in his soul silently, as he thought how wonder-stricken the Dodges and Captain Devoll would be to see him at their location before them; and how he would be made known to the general, and would become a scout for the party, and would be chosen to lead some band against the Indians, who, as every one said, would oppose the new-comers; and how he would surprise a great band of Shawanese, and be the hero of a terrible struggle; and so on, and so on; the whole winding up with his marriage to one of the pretty girls that were coming out from New England when all was ready for them. So one morning young Arthur, with a strange big lump in his throat that kept him swallowing every half-minute, told his father and mother, and his dear little sister Peggy, that he was going to hunt for a day or two, and they, thinking nothing of it, as it was not yet ploughing weather, kissed him as usual, wished him good luck, and went on quietly about their chopping and spinning. He, poor boy, looked back at the old man, with his Scotch bonnet thrown back as he wielded the axe, and at the window, behind which they were working and singing, he could hear Peggy's voice, and his heart almost gave way; but vanity and the love of enterprise are, after all, stronger in a lad of sixteen than home ties or brother's love, and he tearfully turned to the forest again.

He apprehended no danger. The animals of the wilder ness he had no fear of; the Indians were friendly or neutral; and though the way was unknown to him, he had a general notion of the direction in which the mouth of the Muskingum lay, and, confident in his powers as a woodsman, crossed the Alleghany in a canoe which he used when on his common expeditions to the North, intending to keep northwest until he should pass Beaver Creek, and thence hoping, by nearly a direct west course, to strike the Tuscarawas in the vicinity of old Fort Laurens, from which point he would follow the waters down to Fort Harmar, at the mouth of the "Elk Eye."

His plan was well laid, and would have succeeded, probably, so as to bring him to the desired point about the first of April, but for one thing, the fall of heavy rains about the heads of Beaver Creek. Owing to these, when our young adventurer reached the banks of that stream, he found it an impassable torrent; but he could not wait, for the very waters which opposed him would help forward the boatmen whose arrival he longed to anticipate. So, hastily, too hastily, he fashioned a raft of the floating logs and boughs which were rolling by, and with his only treasures, his rifle and powder-horn, trusted himself to the stream, which he hoped to cross gradually by the aid of his setting-pole, and the eddies which here and there sucked shoreward. Alas! those eddies, like many a seeming aid in the voyage of life, were caused by and concealed deadly dangers. The one which Arthur tried to make serviceable was the result of a huge stump, which caught the drift, and held out to the navigator a tempting harbour. With his whole strength he tried to make the proffered landing-place, and in trying failed to see the ragged remnants of the huge boughs, which, reaching up from the submerged trunk of the prostrate sycamore, were grinning at him, like shark's teeth, from just beneath the surface. Another push, and he will be in the

eddy and ashore ; yes, but for them. He puts his shoulder to the pole; the rude raft swings round, the shark's teeth seize it; the rushing waters tug and tear at it; the grapevines, loosely knotted, give way; the severed logs again strike out, each on its own voyage, and among them is struggling for life, for room to breathe, the young builder of castles in the air.

Arthur would have been in no real danger, however, for he was as much at home in water as on land, had he not clung to his rifle. With the instinct of a woodsman he had seized it the instant he felt the raft strike, and heard the bands which held it crack; and amid drift and raft and eddy he still clung to it, struggling for life; for his life was in his breath and his rifle, and he strove to save both. A few moments, however, proved it impossible to do so, and with a groan, more of indignation than regret, he let go his hold and struck out for the shore.

And now he was once more on land, not very dry land, to be sure, for a cold, penetrating, drizzling rain was falling; but beyond the reach of the mad waters at any rate. Yes, he was on land, but how helpless! how hopeless! No gun, no food, his powder afloat, no means of kindling a fire or securing a meal, and in spite of himself shivering to his inmost bones. Two hours he had stood in the water making his unlucky vessel, and the warmth which had been produced by his exertions in trying to land could not counterbalance the physical depression and exhaustion which those two hours had produced, and the shock of the ice-bath that had followed. Had Arthur been an old hand in the wilderness, he would have spent five minutes in making up his mind as to the nearest point where food and warmth could be had, and, without awaiting still further exhaustion from famine and cold, would have used all his remaining strength and energy to reach that point. Had he done so, he would in two hours have been relieved, for he was not more than

five miles above the site of Fort McIntosh.

But Arthur was not an old practical pioneer, an indomitable Boone, or all-conquering Logan, he was he was a young castle-builder, whose airy towers had all been laid low by the swollen waters of the Big Beaver, and in utter despair he threw himself upon the ground, and regretted that he had been able to save his life from the flood.

How long he lay there, half insensible with cold and hopelessness, he never knew. When he arose, as he remembered afterwards, it was night, and fever-pains were shooting through every limb, and fever-phantoms were beginning to whirl their waltzes in his brain. Then all to him was darkness; nor was it ever known whither he went or how he lived during the next three days. At the end of that time, naked as he was born, thin as the skeleton picture of death, and still raving with delirium, he swam off to a boat which was floating down the Ohio, bound to the Beargrass settlements near the Falls, and was with difficulty secured by the emigrants on board.

Among those emigrants were two women who nursed the young sufferer, until at last nature effected a partial cure. A partial cure, we say, for neither nature nor art, nursing, medicine nor rest, could ever make Arthur Campbell again wholly what he had been before. His constitution, just at the age when most susceptible, had been so shaken, so shattered, by excitement, exposure, cold, hunger, disease, and delirium, that, though he lived till within a few years, to the age of seventy-two, he never recovered the effects of his trip to the Beaver. His nerves were so affected, that the slightest excitement or anxiety caused him to quiver like an aspen; and his spirit was for the time so changed, that when, in the midsummer of 1788, he found his way back from the kind friends who had saved his life to his old home on the Kiskiminitas, his parents and Peggy, who had long mourned him as dead, found him, though living, not