The outfit of our little hero is in keeping with the rustic simplicity of the times, consisting of but three garments--an outside shirt, an inside shirt, and a hairy coon-skin cap: the latter having no visor, but being in lieu adorned behind with the ringed tail, just as it grew on the living animal. The cap conceals one of his best features--a forehead bold, broad, round, and white, which, could it be seen, would much improve our portrait. The inside shirt, as may be seen by the collar, is of homespun cotton; the outside shirt of fair, soft buckskin, secured at the waist by a belt of the same material, and falling a little below the knees. Saving the buckskin of mother nature's own providing, the sturdy young legs are without covering--a deficiency which admits of plausible explanation. In those days of simple living and simple thinking, parents, going from cause to effect by shorter cuts than they do at the present time, were much more strict and direct in the training of their children; and breeches softening, as needs must, the severity of the switch, hence the moral efficacy thereof, boys, for the first ten years of their travels in the Paradise, were seldom allowed to wear them--buckskin breeches especially. Nor should we be surprised if just here were to be looked for the reason why our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were so much more energetic, manly, and upright than their grandsons and great-grandsons, and so many more of them broad-backed, clean-limbed, and six feet high.
The background to our portrait is a forest, lofty, shaggy, and dense, and the home of a thousand wild things, which, being invisible at this moment, could not, with due regard to fidelity, be introduced into our picture. The foreground is a cultivated clearing of about one hundred acres, with woody walls, unbroken in their leafy density, hemming it in on every side. Directly in front is a field of corn, the dark and thrifty green of which may well bespeak the deep, rich soil of the Paradise. Farther in are several other inclosures, either white with clover or brightly green with blue-grass, or darkly green with the yet unripened wheat. In the midst of all, and forming the central feature, stands a cabin, deserted and lowly since that unhappy night two years ago.