DANIEL BOONE.

CHAPTER I.

HIS EARLY DAYS.

LIFE in the woods is a romance from beginning to end. The mind delights to dwell upon the freedom, the beauty, the trials, and even the hazards of such* a life, and thinks of it, in contrast with the set forms and customs of civilization, as something so fresh that it raises the imagination to a pitch of the most pleasurable excitement.

There are very few hoys who have not, at one time or another in their lives, felt the secret hut strong impulse to go to sea, or to play at a game of Selkirk solitude in the woods. Daniel Webster used to say to his friends when assembled on his lawn at Marshfield, in the summer evenings, that the two objects in creation which chiefly inspired sentiments of grandeur within his breast, were the stars and the sea; he might well have added to