



Produced by Stephen Kerr and Martin Robb





THE DEERSLAYER

By James Fenimore Cooper




Chapter I.


    "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
    There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
    There is society where none intrudes,
    By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
    I love not man the less, but nature more,
    From these our interviews, in which I steal
    From all I may be, or have been before,
    To mingle with the universe, and feel
    What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal"

    Childe Harold.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus, he
who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived
long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest
assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we account for the
venerable air that is already gathering around American annals. When the
mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial history, the period seems
remote and obscure, the thousand changes that thicken along the links
of recollections, throwing back the origin of the nation to a day so
distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of