Then Inez recovered herself, and addressing the trapper, she demanded, with the dignity of an offended gentlewoman, though with her accustomed grace, to what circumstance they owed this extraordinary and unexpected visit.

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.