Excerpt from A Knight of the Wilderness LL New Salem, tingling with excitement, was down by Cameron's dam. It was not Often that excitement came to that little cluster of log cabins perched on the banks of the Sangamon River in the year Of our Lord 1831. They had their births and their burials, the people of New Salem, and their wooings and their weddings; but a village of a dozen or more log houses cannot well keep itself fully awake with stimulation so meager. Now and then the outer world permitted them a wanderer with gossip from Vandalia; or from Louisville, if their fortune ran strong. Occasionally an itinerant preacher passed that way and aroused them to a state of pleasurable panic. At intervals the boys from Clary's Grove paid them a rough, rol licking call in facetious mood, making the present exhilarating and leaving the future uncertain; but the agreeable sensations which might have been de rived from that form of diversion were marred by danger to life, limb, and law which usually attended these visits. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.