The old man
hesitated; but clearing his throat, like one who was about to make an
effort to which he was little used, he ventured on the following
reply--
"Lady," he said, "a savage is a savage, and you are not to look for
the uses and formalities of the settlements on a bleak and windy
prairie. As these Indians would say, fashions and courtesies are
things so light, that they would blow away. As for myself, though a
man of the forest, I have seen the ways of the great, in my time, and
I am not to learn that they differ from the ways of the lowly. I was
long a serving-man in my youth, not one of your beck-and-nod runners
about a household, but a man that went through the servitude of the
forest with his officer, and well do I know in what manner to approach
the wife of a captain. Now, had I the ordering of this visit, I would
first have hemmed aloud at the door, in order that you might hear that
strangers were coming, and then I--"
"The manner is indifferent," interrupted Inez, too anxious to await
the prolix explanations of the old man; "why is the visit made?"
"Therein shall the savage speak for himself.
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