"The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter"; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,--a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant.

The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form.

For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in the Filson Club Publications.
12.

The Nieblung Lied tells of Siegfried's feats with bear, buffalo, elk, wolf, and deer: "Danach schlug er wieder einen Buffel und einen Elk Vier starkes Auer nieder und einen grimmen Schelk, So schnell trug ihn die Mahre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang; Hinden und Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang.
.......

ein Waldthier furchterlich, Einen wilden Baren." Siegfried's elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent or Bison a buffalo--European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by giving it the name of the extinct aurochs.