“But you promised; and I want to know whether you mean
to keep that promise or not.”

“Supposing I do, you would not have me leave home to-night,
would you?”

“Yes, to-night.”

“But my brother, as you have already discovered, I presume,
has just arrived on a visit; and you know I can't decently
leave him.”

“And what do I care for that? Say whether you will meet
me at the old room, or not, as soon as your company have
cleared out?”

“You are unreasonable, cruel, Gaut.”

“Then say you will not go, and see what will come of it,
Mark Elwood!”

“I must go — I will go, Gaut,” replied Elwood, turning pale
at the last intimation. “As soon as I get rid of the company,
I will start directly for the place.”

“Well, just as you can afford,” said Gaut, doggedly, as he
turned on his heel, and made his way out of the house.

Mark Elwood drew a long breath as he was thus relieved
of the other's presence, and was leaving the room, when Mrs.
Elwood, who had felt much disturbed at discovering among her
guests one of whose questionable character and connection with
her husband she was already apprised, and who, from an adjoining
apartment, had caught a slight glimpse of the meeting
just described, and enough of the conversation to enable her to
guess at its import, hurriedly came forward, and, in a voice
tremulous from suppressed emotion, said:

“You surely are not going out to-night, Mr. Elwood?”

“No — that is — only for a short time,” he said, hesitating,
and a little confused at the discovery of his design, which a
second thought told him she had made; “only for a short time.
But don't stop me to talk now; you see the company are retiring.
I must see the gentlemen off.”

“Mr. Elwood, I must be heard,” persisted the troubled and

[figure description] Page 014.[end figure description]

anxious wife. “I cannot bear to have you go off, and leave
your only brother, whom you have not seen for years, and for
such company! O Mr. Elwood, how can you let that bad
man —”

“Hush! don't get into such a stew. I shall soon be back,”
interrupted the other. “You can excuse my absence. There,
I hear them inquiring for me. I must go,” he added, abruptly
breaking away, and leaving his grieved companion to hide her
emotions as she best could from the guests who were now seen
approaching for their parting salutations.

In a few minutes the company had dispersed for their respective
homes, and with them, also, had unnoticed slipped away
their infatuated host.

p720-028 CHAPTER II.

“At first, he, busy, plodding, poor,
Earned, saved, and daily swelled his store;
But soon Ambition's summits rose,
And Avarice dug his mine of woes.”

[figure description] Page 015.[end figure description]

For the better understanding of some of the allusions of
the preceding chapter, and of others that may yet appear in
different parts of our tale, as well, indeed, as for a better appreciation
of the whole, we will here turn aside from the thread
of the narrative just commenced, to take a brief retrospect of
the leading events and circumstances with which the previous
lives of the several personages we have introduced had been
connected, and among which their characters had been shaped
and their destinies determined.

Some twenty two or three years previous to the juncture we
have been describing, Arthur and Mark Elwood, by the fruits
of their unremitting industry as laborers on a farm in summers,
and as pedlars of what they could best buy and sell in winters,
added to the few hundred dollars patrimony they each inherited,
were enabled, in a few years, to realize the object of their early
ambition, in the opening of a small retail store, in one of the
little outskirt villages of northern New-Hampshire.

Such, like that of hundreds of others among us who now
count their wealth by half millions, was the slender beginning
of these two brothers. And, although they were from the first,
as we have seen them at the last, as different in their general
characters as they were in their persons, they yet got on very
well together; for, however they might disagree respecting the
modes and means of acquisition, they were always as one in

[figure description] Page 016.[end figure description]

regard to the great result each alike had in view, and that was
to make money and be rich. And, by a sort of tacit understanding,
falling into the departments of business best suited to
their different tastes and capacities, the quiet, cautious, calculating,
and systematic Arthur confined himself to the store, kept
the books, contrived the ways and means, and, in short, did the
principal head-work of the establishment; while Mark, being
of a more stirring turn, and, from his brisk bon homme manner
and less scrupulous disposition, better calculated for drumming
up customers and securing bargains for the store, did most of
the outdoor business, riding about the country, contracting for
produce, securing barter deal, and making himself, in all things,
the runner and trumpeter of the company. At night they
usually met together to compare notes and report progress;
and they were never happier than when they sat down in their
small store-room, hemmed in and surrounded by casks of nails,
quintals of codfish, farming tools, etc., on one side, and narrow
shelves of cheap calicos, India cottons, and flaunting ribbons, on
the other, and recounted to each other the business and bargains
of the day. Thus the two, working on, like the spring and
balance-wheel of some piece of mechanism, in harmony together,
soon placed themselves beyond all fears of failure, and seemed
happy and contented with their situation and prospects.

This situation of affairs, however, was not destined to be of
very long continuance. Not long after finding themselves safely
on the highway to independence, they very naturally began to
think of selecting, from among the fair young customers of their
store, the ones who might make them eligible companions for
life. And, as the wayward love-fates would have it, they both
secretly fixed their affections on one and the same girl, — the
pretty and sensible Alice Gregg, who, though a plain farmer's
daughter, was, to the vexation and envy of her numerous rustic
suitors, to be won by nothing short of one of the village merchants.
Alice was not long in discovering her advantage, nor
in deciding to avail herself of it, so far as to confine her election

[figure description] Page 017.[end figure description]

to one of these, her two undeclared lovers. And, after balancing
a while in her mind the account between her judgment,
which would have declared for the reserved but sterling Arthur,
and her fancy, which clamored hard for the manly-looking and
more social Mark, she finally yielded the reins to the latter,
and took measures accordingly. After this, Arthur's taste in
selecting a piece of goods did not, as before, seem to be appreciated.
Her handkerchief was never dropped where he had
any chance to pick it up; and she was never quite ready to go
till Mark was nearest at hand to help her into her wagon or
side-saddle. By this delicate system of female tactics, common
with girls of more pretensions than Alice, she effectually repressed
the advances of the one, and as effectually encouraged
those of the other; and the result, as she had anticipated, was
a declaration from Mark, an acceptance on her part, and a
speedy marriage between them. Arthur's heart bled at the
event; but it bled inwardly; and he had at least the consolation
of believing that no one suspected the state of his feelings,
except, perhaps, Alice, and he was not unwilling that she should
know them. He therefore put the best face on the matter he
could, — appeared wholly unconcerned, — attended the wedding,
and with forced gayety openly wished the new married couple
the happiness which he secretly wished was his own. The
tender passion had been a new thing to the money-loving
Arthur. By its elevating influences, he, who had looked for
enjoyment only in wealth, had been enabled to raise his vision
to a higher sphere of happiness. And thus to lose the bright
glimpses, and be thrown back to earth again, was, in reality,
however he might disguise the fact from others, a serious blow
to his feelings, and one, indeed, which soon mainly led to a
movement on his part that gave a new turn to his apparent
destinies, and a no less one, probably, to those of his then
almost envied brother Mark. For, finding it impossible to feel
his former interest in business, in a place whose associations
had become painful to him, he secretly resolved to leave it as

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

soon as he believed he could do so without leading to any surmises
respecting the true cause of the change he contemplated.
Accordingly, in a few months, he began to suggest his own unfitness
for making a profitable partner in country trade, and
finally came out with a direct proposition to his brother to buy
him out at a sum which he knew would be a temptingly low
one. And the result was, that the proposition was accepted,
“the partnership dissolved by mutual consent,” and the released
Arthur, with his portion, soon on his way to one of the eastern
seaports, to set up business, as he soon did, for himself alone.

The withdrawal of Arthur Elwood deprived this little establishment
of its only really valuable guidance, and left it to the
chance fortunes of greater gains or greater losses than would
have been likely to occur under the cautious and hazard-excluding
system of business which he had adopted for its control.
But, nothing for a year or two occurring to induce Mark
Elwood to depart from the system under which the business
had been conducted, and Arthur's prudent maxims of trade, to
which he had been accustomed to defer, remaining fresh in his
mind, he naturally kept on in the old routine, which he was the
more willing to follow, as by it he found himself clearly on the
advance. He was blessed in his family; for his wife, who had
no undue aspirations for wealth or show, had not only proved
an efficient helper by her economy and good counsels, but added
still more to his gratification by bringing him a promising boy.
Being the only trader of the village, or hamlet it might more
properly be called, he was conscious of being the object of that
peculiar kind of favor and respect which was then — more
freely than at the present day, perhaps — accorded to the country
merchant by the masses among whom he resided. And,
finding his still comparatively moderate expectations thus every
day fully realized, he was satisfied with his condition in the
present, and hopeful and happy in the prospects it presented in
the future; for the demon of unlawful gain had not then
tempted him into forbidden paths by the lure of sudden riches.

[figure description] Page 019.[end figure description]

But that demon at length came in the shape of Gaut Gurley.
From what part of the country this singular and questionable
personage originally came, was unknown, even in the neighboring
village (which was within the borders of Maine) where he
had recently located himself with a young wife and child. And,
as he very rarely made any allusions to his own personal affairs,
every thing relating to his origin, life, and employments, previous
to his appearance in this region, was a matter of mere conjecture,
and many a dark surmise, also, we should add, respecting
his true character. For the last few years, however, he was
known to have followed, at the appropriate seasons of the year,
the business of trapping, or trading for furs with the Indians,
around the northern lakes. He had several times passed
through the village on his returns from his northern tours, and
called on the Elwoods, whose contrasted characters he seemed
soon to understand. But he pressed no bargains upon them
for his peltries; for, disliking the close questionings and scrutinizing
glances of Arthur, and finding he could make no final
trade with Mark without the assent of the former, he gave up
all attempts of the kind, and did not call again during the continuance
of the partnership, nor till this time; when, finding
that Mark was in trade alone, he announced his intention of
spending some time in the village, to see what arrangements
could be made, as he at first held out to Elwood, for establishing
this as his place for the regular sales or deposit of his furs.

But the fur traffic, whatever it might have been formerly,
was now not the main, if any part of the object he had in view.
The times had changed, closing many of the old avenues of
trade, but opening new ones to tempt the ever restless spirit of
gain. And, although the fur trade was still profitable, there was
yet another springing up, which, for those who, like him, had
no scruples about engaging in it, promised to become far more
so. The restrictions which it had been the policy of our government
to throw around commerce, in the incipient stages of
our last national quarrel with Great Britain, had caused an

[figure description] Page 020.[end figure description]

unprecedented rise in the prices of silks and other fine fabrics of
foreign import. This had put whatever there was of the two
alleged leading traits of Yankee character, acquisitiveness and
ingenuity, on the qui vive to obtain those goods at the former
prices, for the purpose of home speculation. And Canada,
being separated by a land boundary only from the States, presented
to the greedy eyes of hundreds of village mammonists,
who, like Elwood, were plodding along at the slow jog of twenty
per cent profits, opportunities of so purchasing as to quadruple
their gains; which were quite too severe a test for their slender
stock of patriotism to withstand. It was but a natural consequence,
therefore, that all of them whose love of gain was
not overcome by their fear of loss by detection and the forfeiture
of their goods, should soon be found, in spite of all the vigilance
and activity of the host of custom-house officers by whom the
government had manned the Canadian lines, secretly engaged
in that contraband traffic.

The history of smuggling as carried on between the Northern
States and Canada, from the enactment of the embargo at the
close of 1807, and especially from the enactment of the more
stringent non-intercourse law of 1810, to the declaration of
war in 1812, and even, to a greater or less extent, to the proclamation
of peace in 1815, is a portion of our annals that yet
remains almost wholly unwritten. Although the contraband
trade in question was doubtless more or less followed along the
entire extent of our northern boundaries, from east to west,
yet along no portions of them half so extensively, probably, as
those of Vermont and New Hampshire, which, from their close
contiguity to Montreal and Quebec, the only importing cities
of the Canadas, afforded the most tempting facilities and the
best chances for success. Along these borders, indeed, it was
for years one almost continuous scene of wild warfare between
the custom-house officers and their assistants, and the smugglers
and their abettors, both parties carrying arms, and the
smugglers, especially, going armed to the teeth. In these

[figure description] Page 021.[end figure description]

skirmishes many were, at different times, killed outright; many
more were missing, even on the side of the officials, for whom
dark fates were naturally conjectured; while hundreds, on
both sides, were crippled or otherwise seriously wounded.
Sometimes, when a double sleigh, or wagon, deeply laden with
smuggled goods, in charge of three or four stout and resolute
fellows aboard, who, with as many more, perhaps, of their confederates
on horseback or in light teams, before and behind,
were making their way, at full speed, with their prize, from
the line to some secret and safe depository in the interior, was
suddenly beset and brought to a stand by an equal or greater
number of government officials, deeply intent on a seizure, a
most furious conflict would ensue, in which the combatants,
growing desperate for the seizure or defence of the prize, would
ply their hard yeoman fists, clubs, loaded whipstocks, or whatever
was at hand, with terrible effect, and often prolong the
melée till the snow or ground was encrimsoned with blood, and
scarcely an uninjured man remained on the ground. Sometimes
the besetting officials were made prisoners, and marched off at
the cocked pistol's mouth into the deep woods, and, after being
led forward and backward through the labyrinths of the forest
till bewildered and lost, were suddenly left to find their way
out as they best could, — a feat which there was no danger of
their accomplishing till long after both the smugglers and their
goods were beyond the reach of pursuers. And sometimes the
smugglers, when closely pressed and seeing no hope of rescue
if taken, as their last resort, drew their dirks and pistols; and
wo to the official who then persisted in attempting a seizure.

But the system of tactics more generally practiced by the
smugglers was that of craft and concealment, carried out by
some ingenious measure to prevent all suspicion of the times
and places of their movements, by travelling in the night or in
stormy weather, or in the most unfrequented routes, and, when
pursued, by putting the pursuers on false scents, or by feints
of running away with loads of empty boxes to mislead pursuit,

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

till the goods, which had been previously taken to some place
of temporary concealment, could be removed from the vicinity
of the search and sent on their destination.

Such were the general features of the illicit traffic which
characterized the period of which we are treating, — a traffic
which laid the foundations of many a village fortune, whose
dashing heirs would not probably be very willing to acknowledge
the true source from which the wealth and position they
may now be enjoying was derived, — and finally a traffic which,
in its attending homicides and desperate affrays, its hot pursuits
and marvellous escapes, its curious concealments and artful subterfuges,
and, lastly, in the family and neighborhood feuds which
it left behind, would furnish materials for a series of tales as
wild and romantic, if not always as creditable to the actors, as
any thing ever yet spread before the public.

It was this questionable business which was then occupying
the thoughts of Gaut Gurley, and in which it was his aim to
involve Mark Elwood, whom he had pitched on for the purpose,
as not only a man of sufficient means, with no scruples which
could not be overcome, but a man whom he believed he could
make dependent on him, when once enlisted, and to whom he
could dictate terms for his own services. And it is no wonder
that a man of his dark cunning, working on one of the obtuse
moral sense, the love of money, and the thoughtlessness of consequences,
of Elwood, should, as he did, soon completely succeed
in his objects. For, after having kindled Elwood's political
prejudices against the embargo law, which was held up to be
such an outrage on the commercial rights of the North that it
were almost a merit to violate it, Gaut proceeded to show how
enormous were the profits to be made in this trade, and how
safely the goods might be smuggled in, through the back roads
and forest routes with which he was familiar, by employing
Frenchmen, as he could, at a cheap rate, to bring them in large
panniers on the backs of their Canadian ponies, or by engaging
Indians, who could be enlisted for even less wages, to bring

[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]

them in knapsacks through the woods. And so clearly did he
demonstrate all this to the mind of Elwood, that the latter,
being unable any longer to resist the temptation of thus securing
the gains of a traffic, by the side of which the small profits
of his store at home dwindled into contempt, soon resolved to
engage in it.

From this time Gaut was in high favor with Elwood. The
two, indeed, seemed to have suddenly become inseparable.
They were always found together, and always engaged in some
closely private conversation, the purport of which no others
were permitted to know, or were enabled to conjecture, except
from the new business movement which was observed soon to
follow the forming of their mysterious connection. And that
movement was that Elwood put his store in charge of a clerk,
and, giving out that he was about to engage more extensively
in the fur trade, which would require him to be often absent,
went off with a strong and fleet double team, in a northerly
direction, with Gaut for his only companion.

With the advent of this new era in the life of Elwood, every
thing became changed about his establishment. His bustling
presence, with his bantering, off-hand, and communicative talk,
no longer enlivened the store and neighborhood; and people,
who before seemed to know every thing about his business and
plans, now knew nothing. For he was now most of the time
absent in conducting his operations at the north, or in his
stealthy journeyings thence to the cities, to receive and dispose
of the valuable packages which he had put on their passage.
He generally came and departed in the night, and, even during
his brief stays at home, he kept himself secluded, seeming to
wish to be seen as little as possible. All this, of course, led to
considerable talk and various speculations; but he so well
shrouded his movements from the public, and kept afloat so
many plausible stories to account for his change of business,
that he prevented suspicions from taking any definite shape

[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]

about home, or spreading abroad to any extent that endangered
his operations, although those operations were constantly continued
for years, and, from cautious and small beginnings, at
length became more bold, extensive, and successful, perhaps,
than any thing of the kind ever carried on in the interior of
New England. But there was one whose suspicions of the true
character of the business in which he was engaged, notwithstanding
his denials and evasions, even to her, and whose fears
and anxieties on account of the dangers she believed he was
constantly incurring, not only from seizure of his property and
the personal violence to which he was exposed in trying to
defend it, but from his association of reckless confederates,
especially Gaut Gurley, of whose dark character, as little as
she had seen of him, she was already filled with an instinctive
dread, — there was one whose suspicions, and consequent
anxieties, he could never succeed in quieting; and that was his
discreet and faithful wife. She had, during the first year or
two of his new career, often expostulated with him on the
doubtful character of his business; but he, by always making
light of her fears, by telling her some truth and withholding
more, and disclosing as great a part of his astonishing gains as
he supposed would pass with her for honest acquisitions, generally
silenced, if he did not convince, her; and she, finding him
always light-hearted and satisfied with himself, when he came
home, finally ceased her remonstrances, having concluded she
would try to conquer her doubts and fears, or at least say no
more on the subject.

At length, however, after a prolonged absence on a tour, in
which he had a large venture at stake, he came home in a
greatly altered mood. His usual buoyancy of spirits was gone;
he appeared gloomy and abstracted; and, although, in reply to
the anxious inquiries of his wife, he represented himself to have
been entire successful, — even to a greater extent than ever
before, — yet it was quite obvious that something very untoward,

[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]

to say the least, must have happened to him. He would not
leave his house after dark, he placed loaded pistols within the
reach of his hand when he went to bed, and he would often
start up wildly from his sleep. His whole conduct, indeed, was
such as to excite the deeper concern of his perplexed wife, for
she feared it betokened his connection with something very
wrong, — something that had brought him into deadly peril, —
something, perhaps, done to others, which made her tremble to
think of, but something, at all events, which made her more
than ever dread to have him go back again to the scene of his
operations. But of the last-named of her fears she was shortly
relieved; for, to her agreeable surprise, he soon assured her of
his determination to break off entirely from the business he had
been pursuing, and, as much to her gratification as to the
evident vexation of Gaut Gurley, who had come on to look his
employer up, he firmly persisted in carrying out his resolution.
Nor was this all. He rapidly drew his business to a close,
broke off his old associations, privately left the place, and, in a
few weeks, sent for his family to join him in Boston, where it
appeared he had been for some time secretly transferring his
capital, and where he had now established himself in business,
with all the means required, even there, of doing it to the best
advantage. And for some years he did engage in business to
advantage, the same strangely good luck attending him, and
prospering wonderfully in all he undertook, till he gained the
reputation of being among the wealthiest of the city. But the
spoiler came in a second appearance of Gaut Gurley, who,
having squandered in the country the bounteous sums of money
which Elwood had paid him for his services, now followed the
latter to the city. And, with the coming of that personage,
together with the foolish ambition that had, about that time,
seized Elwood, to outshine some of his city competitors in display
and expensive living, commenced the wane of a fortune
which, as large as it was, it had required but two short years

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

to bring to the verge on which we represented its unhappy
master as standing in the opening scene of our story.

Having now related all we designed in this retrospect of
events, we will return from the somewhat long but necessary
digression, and take up the thread of the narrative where we
left it.

p720-040 CHAPTER III.

“I strive in vain to set the evil forth.
The words that should sufficiently accurse
And execrate the thing, hath need
Come glowing from the lips of eldest hell.
Among the saddest in the den of woe,
Most sad; among the damn'd, most deeply damn'd.”

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

Once on a time, before the dark catalogue of vices was made
complete by the wicked inventions of men, or the evil made to
counterbalance the good in the world, the Arch Enemy of mankind,
deeply sensible of the vantage-ground occupied by the
antagonistic Being, and anxiously casting about him for the
means of securing an equilibrium of power, called around him
a small company, consisting of those of his Infernal subjects
whom he had previously noted for their excellence in subtility
and devilish invention, and, after fully explaining his wants
and wishes to his keenly appreciating auditory, made proclamation
among them, that the Demon who should invent a new
vice, which, under the name and guise of Pastime, should be
best calculated to seduce men from the paths of virtue, pervert
their hearts, ruin them for earth and educate them for hell,
should be awarded a crown of honor, with rank and prerogative
second only to his own. He then, with many a gracious and
encouraging word to incite in them a spirit of emulation, and
nerve them for exertion in the important enterprise thus set before
them, dismissed them, to go forth among men, observe,
study, and come again before him on a designated time, to report
the results of their respective doings, and submit them to his
decision. Eager to do the will of their lord and Lucifer, as
well as to gain the tempting distinctions involved in his award,

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

the commissioned fiend-group dispersed, and scattered themselves
over the earth, which was understood to be their field of
operations. And, after noting, as long as they chose, all the
different phases of human society, the secret inclinations of
those composing it, their follies, weaknesses, and points most
vulnerable to temptation, they each returned to the dark dominions
whence they came, to cogitate in retirement, concoct and
reduce to form those schemes for securing the great object in
view, which their observations and discoveries on earth had
suggested.

At the time appointed for the hearing and decision, the
demoniac competitors again assembled before their imperial arbiter;
not this time in secret conclave, but in the presence of
thousands of congregated fiends, who, having been apprised of
the new plan about to be presented for peopling the Commonwealth
of Hell with recruits from earth, had come up in all
directions from their dismal abodes, to hear those plans reported,
and witness the awarding of the prize for the one judged most
worthy of adoption. Lucifer then mounted his throne, commanded
silence, and ordered the competitors to advance and
present, in succession, such plans as they would lay before him
for his consideration and decision. They did so; and one of
them, a young and genteel-looking devil, to whom, from a suppose
congeniality of tastes and feelings with the objects of his
care, had been especially assigned the duty of supervising the
fashionable walks of society, now stepped confidently forward
and said:

“I present for your consideration, most honored Lucifer, I
present Fashion as one of those social institutions of men which
might the most easily become, with a little fostering at our
hands, to us the most productive of vices, under a name least
calculated to alarm. It already holds an almost omnipotent
sway over the wealthier, or what they call the higher, classes
of society, who hesitate at no sins that can be committed with
its sanction; and the disposition is every day growing stronger

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

and stronger, among all classes, to fall in with its behests. Encourage
its progress, make its rule absolute with all, and the
world's boasted morality would trouble us, devils, no more.
This would be the direct and natural result among the most
wealthy, who would leave no vice unpracticed, no sin uncommitted,
provided they could excuse themselves under plea that
it was fashionable. With those of more limited means the
effect would be still better; for devotion to Fashion would
beget extravagance — extravagance, poverty — poverty, desperation—
desperation, crime; so with all classes, the result,
for our purpose, would be equally favorable and much the same.
The new vice I therefore propose is the one to be made out of,
and go under the name of, Fashion.”

“There may be something in this conception,” said Lucifer,
thoughtfully, after the speaker had closed; “but is it safe
against all contingencies? What if the world should take it
into their heads to make it fashionable to be good?”

“Not the least danger of that,” rejoined the other, promptly.
“That is a contingency about as likely to happen as that
your highness should turn Christian,” he added, with a sardonic
grin.

“You are right,” responded Lucifer; “and, as your scheme
comes within the rule, on the score of originality, we will reserve
it for consideration.”

“My plan,” said the next demon who spoke, “consists in inciting
man to the general use of intoxicating drinks, under the
plea of taking a social glass; for, let the use of these become
general, and all men were devils ready made, and —”

“True, most true!” interrupted Lucifer; “but that is not
new. That is a vice I invented myself, as long ago as the time
Noah was floating about in the ark, and the first man I caught
with it was the old patriarch himself. Since then it has been
my most profitable agent in the earth, bringing more recruits
to my kingdom than all the other vices put together. But our

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

present movement was to insure something new. The plan,
therefore, does not come within the rule, and must be set aside.”

“The new vice which I propose,” said the third demon who
came forward, “is involved in the general cultivation of music,
which I contend would render men effeminate, indolent, voluptuous,
and finally vicious and corrupt, so that whole nations
might eventually be kept out of heaven and secured for hell
through its deteriorating influences.”

“I am not a little dubious about trying to make a vice out of
music, which would be all reliable for our purposes,” remarked
Lucifer, with a negative shake of the head. “I fear it might
prove a sword which would cut both ways. It may, it is true,
be doing a pretty fair business just now in some localities; but
methinks I already see, in the dim vista of the earth's future, a
cunning Wesley springing up, and exhorting his brethren `Not
to let the Devil have all the good tunes, but appropriate them
to the service of the Lord.' Now if the religious world should
have wit enough, as I greatly fear me they would, to follow the
sagacious hint of such a leader, they might make music an
agency which would enlist two followers for the white banner
of Heaven where it would one for the red banner of Hell. The
experiment would be one of too doubtful expediency to warrant
the trial. The proposition, therefore, cannot be entertained.”

Many other methods of creating an efficient new vice were
then successively proposed by the different competitors; but
they were all, for some deficiency, or want of originality,
in turn, rejected, till one more only remained to be announced;
when its author, an old, dark-eyed demon, who was much
noted for his infernal cunning, and who, conscious perhaps of
the superiority of his device, had contrived to defer its announcement
till the last, now came forward, and said:

“The scheme I have devised for the accomplishment of the
common object of the patriotic enterprise which your Highness
has put afoot, proposes a new vice, which, passing under the
guise of innocent pastime, will not only, by itself, be fully equal

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

to any other of the many vices now known among men, for its
certainty to lure them to its embrace, fascinate, infatuate, deprave,
and destroy them, but will insure the exercise and combine
the powers of them all. It addresses itself to the intellectual
by the implied challenge it holds out to them to make a
trial of their skill; it appears to the unfortunate in business
as a welcome friend, which is rarely turned away; it presents
to pride and vanity the means of gratification that are not to be
rejected; it holds out to avarice an irresistible temptation; it
begets habits of drunkenness; and thus insures all the fruits of
that desolating vice; it engenders envy, hatred, and the spirit
of revenge; in short, it brings into play every evil thought and
passion that ever entered the head and heart of man, while it
the most securely holds its victims, and most speedily hunts
them down to ruin and death.”

“The name? the name?” eagerly shouted an hundred
voices from the excited fiend-throng around.

“The name,” resumed the speaker, in reply, “the name by
which I propose to christen this new and terrible device of mine,
to counteract the power of virtue, and curtail the dominions of
Heaven, is Gambling!”

“Gambling! Gambling!” responded all hell, in thunders of
applause; “and Gambling let it be,” shouted Lucifer, as the
prize was thus awarded by acclamation to the distinguished inventor
of Gambling.

From this supposable scene among the demons, we pass, by
no unnatural transition, to a kindred one among men.

In a back, secluded room, in the third story of a public house
in Boston, of questionable respectability, there might have been
found, a few hours after the dispersion of the party before described,
a small band of men sitting around a table, intently
engaged in games of chance, in which money was at stake;
while on a sideboard stood several bottles of different kinds
of liquors, with a liberal supply of crackers and cigars. Of this
company, two, who have been already introduced to the reader,

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

— Mark Elwood and Gaut Gurley, — seemed to be especially
pitted against each other in the game. It was now deep into
the night, and Elwood said something about going home. But
his remark being received only with jeers by the company, he
sank into an abashed silence and played on. Another hour
elapsed, and he spoke of it again, but less decidedly. Another
passed, and he seemed wholly to have forgotten his purpose;
for he, as well as all the rest of the company, had, by this time,
become intensely absorbed in the play, allowing themselves
no respite or intermission, except to snatch occasionally a glass
of liquor from the sideboard, in the entrancing business before
them. And, as the sport proceeded, deeper and deeper grew
the excitement among the infatuated participants, till every
sense and feeling seemed lost to every thing save the result of
each rapidly succeeding game; and the heat of concentrated
thought and passion gleamed fiercely from every eye, and found
vent, in repeated exclamations of triumph or despair, from every
tongue, according to the varying fortunes of the parties engaged.
On one side was heard the loud and exultant shout of the
winner at his success, and on the other, the low bitter curse of
the loser at his disappointment; the countenance of the one,
in his joy and exultation, assuming the self-satisfied and domineering
air of the victor and master, and the countenance of the
other, in his grief and envy, darkening into the mingled look
of the demon and the slave.

And thus played on this desperate band of gamesters till
morning light, which, now stealing through the shutters of their
darkened room, came and joined its voiceless monitions with
those which their consciences had long since given them, in
warning them to break up and return to their families, made
wretched by their absence. So completely, however, had they
abandoned themselves to the fatal witcheries of the play, that
they heeded not even this significant admonition; but, with uneasy
glances towards the windows, to note the progress of the
unwelcome intrusions of day, turned with the redoubled

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

eagerness often shown by those who know their time is limited to
their hellish engagement.

Through the whole night, Fortune seemed to have held
nearly an even scale between Elwood and his special adversary,
Gaut Gurley, contrary to the evident anticipations of the latter,
and despite all his attempts to secure an advantage. Thus far,
however, he had signally failed in his purpose; and, at the last
game, Elwood had even won of him the largest sum that had as
yet been put at stake between them. This seemed to drive him
almost to madness; and in his desperation he loudly demanded
that the stakes should be doubled for the next trial. It was
done. The game was played, and Gurley was again the loser.

“I will now stay no longer,” said Elwood, rising. “I was
forced here to-night, as you well know, Gurley, against my will,
and against all reason, to stop your clamor for a chance to win
back what you absurdly called your money lost at our last sitting;
though Heaven knows that what I then won was but a pitiful
fraction of the amount you have taken from me, within the
last two years, in the same or in a worse way. I have now
given you your chance, — yes, chance upon chance, all night, —
till your claim has been a dozen times cancelled; and, I repeat,
I will stay no longer.”

“You shall!” fiercely cried Gurley, with an oath. “You
shall stay to give me another chance, or I will brand you as a
trickster and a sneak!”

“Gentlemen,” said Elwood, turning to the company, in an
expostulating tone, “gentlemen, I appeal to you all if I have
not—”

“I will have no appeal,” interrupted Gurley, in a voice
trembling with rage. “I say I will have another chance,
or—”

“Take it, then,” hastily interposed Elwood, as if unwilling
to let the other finish the sentence; “take it: what will you
have the stakes?”

“Double the last.”

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

“Double?”

“Yes, double!”

“Have your own way, then,” said Elwood, with forced composure,
taking up and shuffling the cards for the important
game.

The stake was for a thousand; and the trembling antagonists
played as if life and death hung on the event. And the whole
company, indeed, forgetful of their own comparatively slight
interest, in the momentous one thus put at stake, at once turned
their eyes on the two players, and watched the result with
breathless interest. That result was soon disclosed; when, to
the surprise of all, and the dismay of Gaut Gurley, the victory
once more strangely fell to the lot of Mark Elwood, who, gathering
up the stakes with trembling eagerness, hastily rose from
the table, as if to depart.

“What in the name of Tophet does all this mean?” fiercely
exclaimed Gurley, throwing an angry and suspicious look
round the table upon those who had doubtless been, at other
sittings, his confederates in fleecing Elwood. “Yes, what is
the meaning of this? I ask you, and you, sir?”

“Better ask your own partner,” said one of the men addressed,
with a defiant look.

“Elwood? Pooh!” exclaimed Gaut, with a bitter sneer.

“And why not?” responded the former. “He may have as
good luck as the best of us, as it appears he has had. And
hark ye, Gaut, you look things at us that it might not be safe
for you to say in this room.”

“Gentlemen, you will all bear me out in leaving, now,” here
interposed Elwood, beginning to make towards the door.

“Stop, sir!” thundered Gaut. “You are not a-going to
sneak off with all that money in your pocket, by a d—d sight!”

“Why not, sir?” replied Elwood; “why not, for all you can
say?”

“Because I have lost, sir!” shouted Gurley, hoarse with rage.
“I have lost three games running, — lost all I have. I demand

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

a fair chance to win it back; and that chance I will have, or
I'll make you, Mark Elwood, curse the hour your refused it.”

“Gaut Gurley, you insatiate fiend!” exclaimed Elwood, in
a tone of mingled anger and distress; “you it was who first led
me into this accursed habit of play, by which you have robbed
me of untold thousands yourself, and been the means of my
being robbed of thousands more by others. You have brought
me to the door of ruin before, and would now take all I have
to save me from absolute bankruptcy.”

“Whining hypocrite!” cried Gurley, starting up in rage.
“Do you tell that story when you have my last dollar in your
pocket? But your pitiful whining shall not avail you. If you
leave this room alive, you leave that money behind you.”

“Stop, stop!” here interposed one of the company, who had
noted what had inadvertently fallen from Elwood, in his warmth,
respecting his apprehended bankruptcy; “stop, no such recriminations
and threatenings here! I can show Elwood a way to
dispose of a part of his money, at least, without bringing on
any one the charge of robbing or being robbed. Here is a
note of your signing, Mr. Elwood, — a debt of honor, — for a
couple of hundreds, contracted in this very room, you will remember.
You may as well pay it.”

“I have a similar bit of paper,” said another, coming forward
and presenting a note for a still larger sum.

“And I, likewise,” said a third, joining the group, with an
additional piece of evidence of Elwood's folly, in the shape of a
gambling note; “and I shall insist on payment with the rest,
seeing the money cannot be disposed of between you and Gaut
without a quarrel and danger of bloodshed.”

With a perplexed and troubled air, Elwood paced the room
a moment, without uttering a word in reply to the different demands
that had so unexpectedly been made upon him. He
glanced furtively towards the door, as if calculating the chances
of escaping through it before any one could interpose to prevent
him. He then glanced inquiringly at the company for

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

such indications of sympathy or forbearance as might warrant
the attempt; but in their countenances he read only that which
should deter him from resorting to any such means of escaping
the dilemma in which he now found himself. And, suddenly
stopping short and turning to the new claimants for his money,
he said:

“Well, gentlemen, have your way, then. I had hoped to be
permitted to carry away money enough to meet my bills and
engagements of to-day, — at least, as much as I brought here.
But, as I am not to be allowed that privilege, hand on your
paper, every scrap of my signing, and you shall have your
pay.”

A half-dozen notes of hand were instantly produced and
thrown upon the table, and the holder of each was paid off in
turn; the last of whom drew from Elwood nearly every dollar
he had in his possession.

“There, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, with a sort of desperate
calmness, “in this line of deal, at least, my accounts are all
squared. I am quits with you all.”

“Not with me, by a d—d sight!” exclaimed Gurley, no
longer able to restrain his rage at being thus baulked in his
desperate purpose of getting hold of Elwood's money, by fair
means or foul, before permitting him to leave the room. “Not
with me, sir, till the amount of that last stake, which was just
enough to make me whole, is again in my pocket; and I'll follow
you to the gates of hell, but I'll have it!”

Cowering and trembling beneath the threats and fiendish
glances of the other, Elwood siezed his hat, and rushed from
the room.

On escaping from this “den of thieves,” and gaining the
street below, Elwood's first thought was of home and his shamefully
neglected family, and he turned his steps in that direction.
But, before proceeding far, he began to hesitate and falter in his
course. He became oppressed with the feelings of a criminal.
He was ashamed to meet his family; for, fully conscious that

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

his looks must be haggard, his eyes red and bloodshot, and
his whole appearance disordered, he knew his return in such a
plight, at that hour in the morning, would betray the wretched
employments of the night, especially to his keen-sighted brother,
on whose assistance he now doubly depended to save him from
ruin. He therefore changed his course, and was proceeding
towards his store, when he met his confidential clerk, who was
out in search of him, and who, in great agitation, informed him
that his drafts of yesterday had all been returned dishonored;
that bills were pouring in, and the holders clamorous for their
pay. Struck dumb by the startling announcement, it was some
moments before Elwood could collect his thoughts sufficiently
to bid his clerk return, and put off his creditors till the next
day, when he would try to satisfy them all. And, having done
this, he turned suddenly into another street, wound his way
back to the inn he had just left, took a private room, locked
himself in, and for a while gave way to alternate paroxysms
of grief, remorse, and self-reproaches. After exhausting himself
by the violence of his emotions, he threw himself upon a
bed, and, thinking an hour's repose might mend his appearance,
so as to enable him the better to disguise the cause of his absence,
on his return to his family, which he now concluded to
defer till towards dinner-time, he fell into a slumber so profound
and absorbing, that he did not awake till the shadows of
approaching night had begun to darken his room.

Leaping from his couch, in his surprise and vexation at having
so overslept himself, he hastily made his toilet, and immeately
set out for home, — a home which, for the first time in his
life, he now dreaded to enter. To that wretched home we will
now repair, preceding his arrival, to relate what had there occurred
in his absence.

p720-051 CHAPTER IV.

“Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish father, who
will no more be admonished.”

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

After the breaking up of the party, as described in the
former chapter, Arthur Elwood, on joining the family circle,
and not meeting his host and brother there, as he naturally
expected, expressed his surprise at the circumstance, and inquired
the cause of his absence. But, perceiving that the subject
gave pain to Mrs. Elwood, who deemed it prudent but to
repeat, as she hesitatingly did, what her husband had told her,
that he had gone out, soon to be back, the former forbore any
further inquiries or comments, and soon retired to rest, wishing
her a good-night and pleasant slumbers.

“Good-night and pleasant slumbers!” slowly and murmuringly
repeated the anxious and troubled wife, on whose ear the
words, kindly meant as she knew them to be, fell as if in
mockery to her feelings. “Pleasant slumbers for me! Heaven
grant they may be made so by his speedy coming; but—”
and, being now alone, and thus relieved of the restraining presence
of others, she burst into tears, and wept long and bitterly.

Woman was not created to act independently. The sphere
in which she is formed to move, though different, is yet so immediately
connected with that of man, that her destiny is
inseparable from his. Her happiness and prosperity are not
in her own keeping. The welfare of the husband is the welfare
of the wife; and, if poverty and disgrace, the concomitants of
vice, fall on him, she must participate equally in the physical
evil, and drink as much deeper of the cup of moral misery as
her unblunted sensibilities are more lively, and her sense of

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

right and wrong are more acute, than those of him who has
become dead to the one and lost to the other. What wonder,
then, that she should so agonize and weep in secret over his
moral deviations, and all the more bitterly, because, with the
most intense desire to do so, she has no power to remedy the
evil? But, for that sorrow and suffering, who before high
Heaven will be held responsible? Who, but the doubly-guilty
husband whose conduct has caused them?

Through the whole of that, to her, long and dreary night,
Mrs. Elwood never once thought of retiring to rest, but kept up
her vigils in waiting and watching for her husband: now listening
pensively to the wind that seemed to moan round her solitary
apartment in unison with her own feelings; now straining
her senses to catch some sound of his approach; and now, perhaps,
throwing herself upon a sofa, and falling, for a moment,
into a troubled slumber, but only to start up at the first sound
of the rattling windows, to listen again, and again to be disappointed.
In this manner she wore away the lingering hours
of the night, till the long prayed-for daylight, which she supposed,
at the farthest, would bring back her truant husband,
made its welcome appearance. But daylight came not this time
to remove the cause of her anxieties. Elwood had several
times before staid out nearly through the night, but the approach
of daylight had always, till now, brought him home;
and, not making his appearance, as she confidently expected,
she became, as the morning advanced, really alarmed for his
personal safety, and would have immediately sent out for him,
but she knew not whom to send. She therefore concluded to
put off the already long-delayed breakfast no longer; and, summoning
her brother-in-law, who, with herself (her son, whom
we have yet more particularly to introduce to the reader, being
temporarily absent from town), now constituted all the family
remaining to join in the repast. The two then sat down to the
table, and partook the meal mostly in gloomy silence, one still
hoping all might yet turn out well, and therefore repressing her

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

twofold apprehensions; and the other, out of regard to her feelings,
kindly forbearing to pain her with remarks and inquiries
on a subject which they mutually felt conscious was oppressing
the hearts of both.

After the meal was over, Arthur Elwood arose, and, briefly
announcing his intention of going out to look up his brother,
who, he said, would be likely soon to be found at his store, left
the house. At the usual dinner hour, Arthur Elwood returned
to the house, and was met at the door by his anxious hostess,
whose countenance quickly fell as she perceived him to be
alone.

“Have you not yet seen my husband?” she eagerly demanded.

“No, but have heard of him. He is somewhere in the city,
I believe,” replied the other.

“In the city and not return?” persisted the surprised and
distressed wife. “How can this be? — what does it mean?”

“I do not know,” replied Arthur, with a thoughtful and perplexed
air.

Mrs. Elwood for a moment stood mute as a statue; for, but
too well conjecturing what was passing in the mind of the other,
she durst not ask his opinion. But, soon regaining her usual
composure, she led the way to the dinner-table, where the meal
that followed was partaken much as the one that preceded it,—
in silence and mutual constraint, which was only relieved by
an occasional forced, commonplace remark.

“I shall again go to Mark's store,” said Arthur, with stern
gravity, as he rose from the table, after he had finished his
repast, “and I shall also take the liberty of looking into the
condition of his affairs. After that, I may return here again,
though to remain only for a short time, as I leave for home in
the evening.”

Towards night Arthur Elwood returned, and in his usual
quiet way entered the room where Mrs. Elwood was sitting;
when, shaking his head as if in reply to the question respecting

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

her still absent husband, which he saw, by the painfully inquiring
expression of her countenance, was rising to her lips, he
took a seat by her side, and, with an air of concern and a slight
tremor of voice, commenced:

“I have been debating with myself, sister Alice, whether it
were a greater kindness to go away without seeing you, and of
course without apprising you of what I may have discovered
respecting your husband and his affairs, or come here and tell
you truths which would be painful, — too painful, perhaps, for
you to bear.”

“'Tis better I should know all,” rather gasped than uttered
Mrs. Elwood. “You will tell me the truth, — others may not.
Go on.”

“Your husband,” resumed the other, “wrote me for the help
of a few thousands, which I would have freely loaned, but for
my suspicions that all was not right with him; and, as I plainly
told him, I came on to ascertain for myself whether such help
would be thrown away, or really relieve him, as he represented,
from a mere temporary embarrassment. I have now been into
the painful investigation, and find matters, I grieve to say, tenfold
worse than I suspected. He is, and must have been for a
long time, the companion and the victim of blacklegs and cutthroats,
and —”

“I suspected, — I knew it,” interrupted the eager and trembling
listener; “and O Arthur, how I have tried and wept and
prayed to induce him to break off from them; for I felt they
would eventually ruin him.”

“Eventually ruin him! Why, Alice, with his own miscalculations
in business, folly and extravagance in every thing, they
have done so already.”

“But the main part of his property,” demanded the other,
with a startled look, “you don't mean but what the main part
of his property is still left?”

“Yes, I do, Alice, — but I see you are not prepared for this.

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

Still, you may as well know it now as ever. Yes, Alice,
your husband is irretrievably bankrupt!”

Mrs. Elwood was not indeed prepared for this development.
She had foreseen, it was true, the coming evil; but she supposed
it was yet in the distance. She knew her husband's
property had been a large one; and the announcement, from
one she could not disbelieve, that it was all gone, struck her
dumb with surprise and consternation. She uttered not a word.
She could not speak, but sat pale and trembling, the very picture
of distress.

After pacing the room a few moments, with frequent commiserating
glances at the face of the other, whose distress
evidently deeply moved him, Arthur Elwood stopped short
before her and said:

“Sister Alice, my time is about up, — I must go.”

“Have you no word to leave for my husband when he
comes?” asked Mrs. Elwood, with an effort to appear composed.

“No, — none whatever to him; but with you, Alice,” he
added, drawing out a small package of bank notes and dropping
them into her lap, “with you, and for you alone, against a day
of necessity, I leave that trifle — no hesitation — keep it — put
it out of sight — there, that is right. Now only one thing more,—
what of your son?”

“Claud?”

“Yes. You know it has happened that I have never seen
him.”

“I do know it, and have much regretted his absence; for I
wished you to see him. But I am now looking for him every
hour, and if you could delay —”

“No, no, I must go. Tell him to forget, at once, that he was
ever a rich man's only son and heir, and learn to profit by a
rich man's errors; for, till he does this, which, if he is like
others, will require some time, he will make no real advance in
life.”

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

“Your impression may be natural, but it hardly does him
justice. He is not like most others. Claud is a man now.”

“So much the better, then, for you and himself. But you see
with a mother's eyes, probably, and speak with a mother's heart.
I will inquire about him, however, as indeed I will about you
all. Good-by.”

Thus did the unimpassioned Arthur Elwood, with a seeming
business-like roughness and want of feeling, assume to hide
the emotions which he really felt in the discovery of his
brother's ruin, and in witnessing the distress he had just caused
in communicating it, hurry through the painful interview, and
abruptly depart, leaving Mrs. Elwood to struggle in secret with
the chaos of thoughts and emotions which Arthur's unexpected
revelation had brought over her. She was not left long, however,
to struggle with her feelings alone. In a short time the
sound of a familiar footstep hastily entering the front hall of
the magnificent mansion, — alas! now no longer her own, — suddenly
caught her ear; when, with the exclamation, “Claud, O
Claud!” she rushed forward to her advancing son, and, to use
the expressive language of Scripture, “fell on his neck and
wept.”

“I heard of father's failure,” said the son, a fine looking
youth of about twenty, with his mother's cleanly cut features
and firm, thoughtful countenance, joined to his father's manly
proportions. “I learned, as I came into the city, an hour ago,
that father had just failed, his store been shut up, and all his
property put into the hands of his creditors; and I hurried
home to break the news to you. But I see you know it all.”

“Yes, that the blow was impending, but not that it had already
fallen, as you now report; but it may as well come to-day as
to-morrow or next week. Half my nights, for months, Claud,
have been made sleepless by the bodings and fears of the evil
day, which, as things were going, I felt must eventually come;
but never, till within this very hour, did I dream that our misfortunes
were so near. But, though the storm has burst so

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

much sooner than I expected, I could bravely face it, could we
say that it was caused by no fault of our own; but to be brought
upon us in this manner, my son, it is hard, hard to bear.”

“But you have not been to blame, mother; and I did not
suppose you thought enough of wealth to grieve so at its loss.”

“I do not, Claud. It is not that; still, I could not help
thinking of your disappointment, even in that view of the misfortune.”

“Mine, mother? Why, I am no worse off than father was
when he started in life; no worse off than thousands who
begin with no other resources than what lie in clear heads and
strong hearts. I can take care of myself; and, what is more, I
can take care of you, dear mother. Surely, you won't doubt
me?”

“No, Claud, no. You have always been my pride, latterly
almost my only hope; and I know not now but that you must
be my only staff, on which to lean as I pass down the decline
of life.”

“And I will be one to you, mother; but come, cheer up, and
let us go in and talk over these matters more calmly.”

The mother and son accordingly retired to her usual sittingroom;
where, since her overcharged bosom had found relief in
tears, and her sinking spirits had been raised by the kind and
comforting words of her dutiful son, she told him all that had
occurred during the two preceding days, which constituted the
brief but eventful period of his absence. They then were beginning
to counsel together on the prospects and probabilities
of their gloomy future; but their conversation was suddenly
cut short by the abrupt entrance of the wretched husband and
father, who, on his way from the hotel where he had spent the
day in sleeping off his debauch in concealment, having received
an intimation of what was going on among his creditors, had
hurried home, with a confidence and self-possession which he
could not summon when he started; for, out of this movement
among his creditors, which he still would not believe was any

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

thing more than a sort of practical menace to enforce payment,
he saw not only how he could frame a plausible excuse for his
guilty absence, but make the circumstance an irresistible plea for
forcing from his brother a loan sufficient to enable him to arrest
his failure and continue business. On entering the room, therefore,
after saluting his wife and son in a sort of brisk, unconcerned
manner, and muttering that he “thought they would never let
him get home again,” he eagerly inquired for Arthur; and, on
being informed that his brother had started for his home, without
leaving any note or word for him, and especially on being
told by his son — as he at length calmly and persistingly was,
in despite of his multiplied prevarications and denials, what
they all knew, and what he himself should have been the last
to be ignorant of — that the question of his failure, for more
than he could ever pay, had already been settled against him,
he became frantic in the outpourings of his rage, disappointment,
and chagrin; sometimes declaring that the world, grown
envious of his prosperity, had all suddenly become his enemies,
and grossly belied him; sometimes savagely charging his
brother, wife, and son with conspiring together against him;
and sometimes cursing his own blindness and folly. And thus
he continued to rave, and walk the room for hours, till his wife
and son, having partaken their evening meal before his unheeding
eyes, and become sick and wearied in listening to his insane
ravings, — to which they had wholly ceased making any reply,—
retired to rest, leaving him to partake such food as was left
on the table, to occupy, as he chose to do, the same sofa which
his hapless wife had done the night before, to sleep down the
wild commotion of his feelings, and awake a calmer and more
humbled, but not yet a better or much wiser man.

But we do not propose to describe in detail the rapid descent
from opulence and station to poverty and insignificance, which
now transpired to mark this era in the singular fortunes of
Elwood and his family. Their history, for the next three
months, was but the usual painful one which awaits the failed

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

merchant everywhere in the cities. The crushing sense of
misfortune which, for the first few days after the unexpected
blow has fallen, weighs down the self-deceived or otherwise
unprepared victims; the succeeding weeks of dejection and
mortified pride; then the painful trial of parting with the
showy equipage, the costly furniture, and the cherished mementoes,
which had required, perhaps, the care of half a life in
gathering; then the compulsory abdication of the great and
conspicuous mansion for the small, obscure, hired cottage; then
the saddening bodings and deep concern felt in seeing the
means of living daily diminishing, with no prospect of ever
being replenished; and, finally, the humiliating resort of the
wife and children to the needle or menial employments, for
the actual necessaries of life, — these, all these, are but the
usual graduated vicissitudes of sorrow and trial which are
allotted to those whose folly and extravagance have suddenly
thrown them on the downward track of fortune, and which the
Elwoods, in common with others, were now doomed to experience,
and, on the part of Mrs. Elwood, especially, with aggravations
not necessarily incident to such reverses. She would
have borne all the deprivations and evils incident to her husband's
failure without a murmur, could she have seen in him
any amendment in those habits and vicious inclinations which
had led to his downfall. But she could not. The hopes she
had confidently entertained, that his misfortunes would humble
and reform him, were doomed to disappointment. He still
madly clung to his old associates of the gambling-table; and
all the money he could get was lost or squandered among them,
till he became too poor and desperate even for them, and they
drove him from their society to join another and a lower
set, who in turn compelled him to seek other still lower and
more degraded associations. And so descended, step by step,
along the path of degradation, the once princely merchant, till,
despised and shunned by all respectable men, he became the

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

fit companion of the meanest thimble-riggers of the cellars,
and the lounging tipplers of the streets.

His case, however, as hopeless as it might appear, was not
permitted to become an irretrievable one. Through a seemingly
accidental circumstance, a light one day broke on his beclouded
and half-maddened brain, that led to a self-redemption
as happy for himself and family as it was unexpected by all.
A former friend, one morning, moved perhaps by his forlorn
appearance, in passing him with a light carriage, invited him
to ride a few miles into the country; where, being unexpectedly
called off in another direction, he left Elwood to return on foot
by a nearer route across the fields to his home. After travelling
some distance, he reached an elevation which overlooked
the city, and, feeling a little fatigued, he sat down on a mossy
hillock to rest and enjoy the prospect. As he cast his eye over
that busy haunt of men, with its numerous spires shooting upward,
its long lines of princely dwellings, its encircling forest
of masts, its lofty warehouses, and other evidences of wealth
and business, his own former important participation in its
busy scenes, and his present worse than insignificant position
there, rose in vivid contrast in his awakening mind; and the
thought of his past but squandered wealth came up only to add
poignancy to the sense of his present poverty and humiliation,
which thus, and for the first time, was brought home to his
agitated bosom. Suddenly leaping from his seat, from the
torturing force of the reflection, he exclaimed: “Must I bear
this? Cannot I still be a man? I will! yes, before Heaven,
I will!” And, resuming his seat, his mind became intently
engaged in studying out ways and means for carrying the sudden
but stern resolution into effect; when, after another hour
thus employed, he again jumped up, and, with the air of one
who has reached some unalterable conclusion, he rapidly made
his way homeward.

While the besotted Elwood was undergoing, so unexpectedly,
even to himself, such a moral transformation in the solitude of

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

the fields, an event occurred to his sorrowful wife at home,
which was equally unexpected to her; which, though of a
wholly different character, produced an equally great revulsion
in her feelings as the one happening to her husband, about
the same hour, was to him, or was producing in his feelings,
and which, by the singular coincidence, seemed to indicate that
the angel of mercy was at length spreading his wings at the
same time over both heads of this unfortunate family. She
had been having one of her most disconsolate days, and was
sitting alone in her little room, gloomily pondering over her
disheartening trials, without being able to see one ray of light
in the dark future, when she received a call from one of her
husband's chief creditors; who announced that those creditors,
at a recent meeting, having ascertained her meritorious conduct
and needy situation, had voted her the sum of five hundred
dollars, which, confiding in her discretion for a judicious outlay
of the money, he now, he said, had the pleasure of presenting
her. And, having placed the money in her hands, and taken
the tear of gratitude — which, preventing the utterance of the
word-thanks she attempted, had started to her cheek at the unexpected
boon — as a sufficient acknowledgment, he kindly bade
her adieu, and departed.

That evening the husband and wife met as they had not for
months before: each at first surprised at seeing the unclouded
brow and hopeful countenance of the other, but each soon instinctively
feeling that something had occurred to both, which
was not only of present moment, but the harbinger of happier
days to come. When confidence and hope are springing up in
doubtful or despairing bosoms, the tongue is soon loosened
from the frosts of reserve, however closely they may have before
imprisoned it. Elwood, with many expressions of regret
at his past conduct, and of wonder at the blindness and folly
which had permitted him so long to persevere in it, told his
gratified companion all that had that day passed through his
mind, — his sudden sense of shame and degradation; his bitter

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

self-reproaches, and succeeding determination to reform; to
atone for the past, as far as he could, by future good conduct;
to begin, in fine, the world anew, and, after placing himself
beyond the reach of those temptations to which he had so fatally
yielded, devote the remainder of his days to honest industry.
And she, anxious to encourage and strengthen him, and fearing
his total want of means might defeat his good resolutions, — she,
also, as she believed it would be true wisdom to do, informed
him of her good fortune, and offered him a portion of her unexpected
acquisition, to enable him to engage in such business as
he should decide to follow. They then discussed, and soon
mutually agreed on, the expediency of leaving the city, where,
as they had once there enjoyed wealth and station, they must
both ever be subjected to mortifying contrasts, — both constantly
doomed

“To see profusion which they must not share,”—

“But I resolved,” said Elwood, after a pause, “not only on
going to the country, but on to a new lot of land in the very
outskirts of civilization. You, however, should I succeed in
getting up comfortable quarters, would not be content to make
such a place your home?”

“Anywhere, Mark; and the farther from the dangerous
influences of this wicked city, the better. Yes, to the very
depths of the wilderness, and I will not complain.”

“It is settled, then. I was once, in one of my early excursions,
along the borders of the wild lakes lying on the northeastern
line of New Hampshire, where a living may be obtained
from the cultivation of the soil alone; but where more may be
made, at particular seasons, in taking the valuable furs that
there abound. There I will go, contract for a lot of land, and
prepare a home, leaving you, and Claud, if he shall decide for
a woodman's life, to come on and join me next summer.”

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

“That Claud will do; for he often declares himself disgusted
with the trickery of trade, and to be longing for the country
life of his boyhood. But here he comes, and can speak for
himself.”

The son now joined in the family deliberations, and learning,
with surprise and gratification, what had occurred during the
eventful day, joyfully fell in with his father's proposition; when
it was soon decided that the latter should take half the money
that day given to Mrs. Elwood, to lay out in a lot of land and
house, and immediately proceed on his journey.

Whatever Mark Elwood had once firmly decided on, he was
always prompt and energetic in executing. Before nine o'clock
that evening, his knapsack of clothing was made up for a journey
on foot, which, contrary to the wishes of his wife and son,
he decided should be his mode of travelling. He then went
to bed, slept six hours, rose, dressed, bade his family good-by,
turned his back on the now loathed city, and, by sunrise next
morning, was far on his way towards his designated home
among the distant wilds of the North.

p720-064 CHAPTER V.

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture in the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,—
I love not man the less, but nature more.”

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

Once more in the green wilderness! Welcome the wild
scenes of our boyhood, which, as the checkered panorama of
the past is unrolled at our bidding, rise on the mental vision
in all their original freshness and beauty! It was here we
first essayed to study the works of nature, and in them trace
the Master-hand that moulded and perfected them. It was
here we learned to recognize the voice of God in the rolling
thunder, and his messengers in the swift-winged lightnings; to
mark the forms of beauty and grandeur in every thing, from
the humble lichen of the logs and rocks, to the high and towering
pine of the plain and the mountain, — from the low murmurings
of the quiet rivulet, to the loud thunderings of the
headlong cataract, — and from the soft whisperings of the gentle
breeze, to the angry roar of the desolating tornado; and,
finally, it was here that our first and most enduring lessons of
devotion were learned, here that our first and truest conceptions
of the grand and beautiful were acquired, and here that
the leading tone of our intellectual character, such as it may
be, was generated and stamped on us for life.

The second part of our story, to which the preceding chapters
should be taken, perhaps, as merely introductory, opens about
midsummer, and among that remarkable group of sylvan lakes—
nearly a dozen in number — which, commencing on the
wild borders of northerly New Hampshire, and shooting off
in an irregular line some fifty miles northeasterly into the

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

dark and unbroken forests of Maine, appear on the map, in
their strangely shapeless forms and scattered locations, as if
they must have been hurled, by the hand of some Borean
giant, down from the North Pole in a volley of huge ice-blocks,
which fell and melted where they now lie, sparkling, like rough
gems, on the shaggy bosom of the wilderness.

Near the centre of an opening of perhaps a dozen acres,
about a mile from where the sinuous Androscoggin debouches
full grown, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, from its
parent reservoir, the picturesque Umbagog, stood a newly
rigged log house, of dimensions and finish which indicated more
taste and enterprise than is usually exhibited in the rude habitations
of the first settlers. It was a story and a half high,
and the walls were built of solid pine timber, originally roughly
hewed, but recently dressed down with broad axe over the
whole outward and inner surfaces so smoothly that, at a little
distance, they presented, with their still visible seams, more the
appearance of the wainscoting of some costly cottage than
the humble log cabin. The building had also been newly
shingled, new doors supplied, the windows enlarged, the yard
around leveled off, with other improvements, of a late date,
betokening considerable ambition for appearance, and considerable
outlay of means, for so new a place, to fit up a tidy
and comfortable abode for the occupants. In the surrounding
field were patches of growing maize, wheat, potatoes, and some
of the common table vegetables; the hay crop for the winter
sustenance of the only cow and yoke of oxen, the best friends
of the new settler, having been just cut and stored in an adjoining
log-building, as was evident from the fresh look of the
stubble, and the stray straws hanging to the slivered stumps or
bushes in the field, and from the fragrant and far-scenting locks
protruding from the upper and lower windows of the well-crammed
receptacle passing under the name of barn. Beyond
this little opening, and bounding it on every side, stood the encircling
wall of woods, through and over which gleamed the

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

bright waters of the far-spreading Umbagog on the north;
while all around, towering up in their green glories, rose, one
above another, the amphitheatric hills, till their lessening individual
forms were lost, or mingled in the vision with the
lofty summits of the distant White Mountains in the south and
west, and of the bold detached eminences which shot up from
the dark wilderness and studded the horizon in all other directions.

Such, and in such a locality, was, as the reader probably has
already inferred, the residence which Mark Elwood had pitched
upon for beginning life anew. On leaving the city, as represented
in the last chapter, he had, under the goading remembrance
of follies left behind, and the incitements of hope-constructed
prospects before, perseveringly pushed on, till he
reached this lone and wild terminus of civilized life; when,
finding, a mile beyond the last of the scattered settlements of
the vicinity, a place on which an opening had been made and
the walls and roof of a spacious log house erected, the year
before, he had succeeded in purchasing it, for ready money, at
a price which was much below its value, and which left him
nearly half his little fund to be expended in more thoroughly
clearing the land, getting in crops, making the house habitable,
and felling an additional tract of forest. And with so much
energy and resolution had he pursued his object of seeing himself
and family once more united at a comfortable home, that,
within three months from the time he commenced operations,
which was in the first of the spring months, he had accomplished
it all; for his wife and son, rejoicing in the knowledge
of his success which he had communicated to them, and
promptly responding to his invitation to join him, had come on,
with their little all of goods and money, in teams hired for the
purpose; and they were now all together fully installed in their
new home, pleased with the novelty and freshness of every
thing around them, proud and secure in their conscious independence
and exemption from the dangers and trials they had

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

recently passed through, and contented and happy in their
situation.

The particular time we have taken for the reäppearance of
the family on this, their new stage of action, was a warm but
breezy afternoon on one of the last days of July. Elwood
was engaged in his new-mown field, in cutting and grubbing up
the bushes and sprouts which had sprung up during the season
around the log-heaps and stumps, and could not easily or conveniently
be cut by the common scythe while mowing the
grass. He was no longer robed in the broadcloth and fine
linen, in which, as the rich merchant, he might have been
seen, perhaps, one year ago that day, sauntering about “on
'change” among the solid men of Boston. These had been
mostly worn out or sold during the changing fortunes of the
year, and their place was now wisely supplied by the long towfrock
and the other coarse garments in common use among the
settlers. Nor had his physical appearance undergone a much
less change. Instead of the pallid brow, leaden eye, fleshly
look, and the red cheek of the wine-bibber and luxurist of the
cities, he exhibited the embrowned, thin, but firm and healthy
face, and the clear and cheerful complexion of the contented
laborer of the country, — tell-tale looks both, which we always
encounter with as much secret disgust in the former as we do
with involuntary respect in the latter. He now paused in his
labors, and stood for some time looking about the horizon, as if
watching the signs of the weather; now noting the progress of
the haze gathering in the south, and now turning his cheek
first one way and then another, apparently to ascertain the
doubtful direction of the wind, which, from a lively western
breeze, had within the last hour lulled down into those small,
fluctuating puffs usually observable when counter-currents are
springing up, balancing, and beginning to strive for the mastery.
After a while he moved slowly towards the house, continuing
his observations as he went, till he came near the open window
at which Mrs. Elwood was sitting at her needle-work, from

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

which she occasionally lifted her eyes, and glanced somewhat
anxiously along the path leading down through the woods to a
landing-place on the lake; when, looking round and observing
her husband standing near, giving token of being about to speak,
she interposed and said:

“You have seen nothing of Claud, I suppose? What can
be the reason why he does not return? He was to have been
at home long before this, was he not?”

“Yes,” carelessly replied Elwood, “unless he concluded to
take a bout in the woods. He took his fowling-piece with him,
to use in case the trout wouldn't bite, you know. Phillips, the
old hunter, came into the field where we were last night, and
said he was out of meat, and must skirt the lake to-day for a
buck. I presume Claud may have joined him. There! hark!
that sounded like Claud's piece,” he added, as the distant report
of a gun rose from the woods westward of the lake and died
away in swelling echoes on the opposite shore. “And there,
again!” he continued, as another and sharper report burst, the
next moment, from the same locality, — “there goes another,
but not his, as he could not have loaded so quick. That must
have been Phillips' long rifle. They are doubtless together
somewhere near the Magalloway, — some three miles distant, I
should judge, — and are probably having fine sport with something.”

“That may be the case, perhaps,” responded Mrs. Elwood.
“I wish, however, he would come; for I cannot yet quite divest
myself of the idea that there may be danger in these wild scenes
of the lakes and the woods. But what was you about to say
when I first spoke? You were going to say something, I
thought.”

“O — yes — why, I was about to say that I had made up
my mind to set fire to the slash. It is dry enough now to get a
good burn; and it looks to me a good deal like rain. I wish
to get the land cleared and ready to sow with winter wheat by

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

the first of September; and I don't like to risk the chance of
finding every thing in so good order again.”

“There is no danger that the fire will spread, or be blown
to the buildings, is there?”

“No, the wind is springing up in the south now, and will
drive the fire only towards the lake in the direction of the
landing.”

“But Claud may be there.”

“Well, if he should be, the fire won't burn up the lake, I
think; and, if it besets the path in the woods, he can come round
some other way,” jocosely said Elwood, moving away to carry
his purpose into execution.

Having procured a parcel of splinters split from the dry and
resinous roots of some old pine stub, — that never-failing and
by no means contemptible substitute for lamp or candle among
the pioneers of a pine-growing country, — he proceeded rapidly
to the edge of the slash, as a tract of felled forest is generally
denominated by the first settlers, especially of the northern
States. Here, pausing a moment to mark with his eye the
most favorable places to communicate the fire, he picked his
way along the southern end to the farthest side of the tangled
mass of trees of every description composing the slash, which
was a piece of some four or five acres, lying on the western
border and extending north and south the whole length of the
opening. And, having reached his destination, and kindled all
his splinters into a blaze, he threw one of them into the thickest
nest of pine or other evergreen boughs at hand, and darted back
to his next marked station, where he threw in another of his
blazing torches, and so on till he reached the cleared ground,
which was not one moment too soon for his safety. For so
dry and inflammable had every thing there become, under the
scorching sun of the preceding fortnight, which had been relieved
by neither rain nor cloud, that, the instant the fire touched
the tinder-like leaves, it flashed up as from a parcel of scattered
gunpowder; and, bursting with almost explosive quickness all

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

around, and swiftly leaping from bough to bough and treetop
to treetop, it spread with such astonishing celerity that he
found it hard on his heels, or whirling in a hot cloud over his
head, at every pause he made to throw in a new but now unnecessary
torch, in his rapid and constantly quickened run
through the slash. And when, after running some distance
into the open field, to escape the stifling smoke and heat by
which he was even there assailed, he turned round to note
more fully the surprising progress that the terrible element he
had thus let loose was making, he beheld all that part of the
slash which he had a moment before passed through already
enveloped, from side to side, in a continuous blaze, whose red,
curling crest, mounting every instant higher and higher, was
advancing with the seeming speed of a race-horse on its fiery
destination. Half-appalled by the sight of such a sudden and
unexpected outburst of the fire he had kindled, Elwood hurried
on to his house, and joined his startled wife in the yard; when
the two took station on an adjoining knoll, and looked down
upon the conflagration in progress with increasing wonder and
uneasiness, — so comparatively new was the scene to them
both, and so far did it promise to exceed all their previous conceptions,
in magnitude and grandeur, of any thing of the kind
to be met with in the new settlements. And it was, indeed, a
grand and fearful spectacle: For, with constantly increasing
fury, and with the rapidity of the wind before which it was
driving, still raged and rolled on the red tempest of fire. Now
surging aloft, and streaking with its winding jets of flame the
fiercely whirling clouds of smoke that marked its advance, and
now dying away in hoarse murmurs, as if to gather strength
for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment
followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central
elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered,
and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left
standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for
the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through the
woods or over the lake. Here the fiery billow, as if governed
by the human tactics of a military assault, paused, parted, and
swept by on either side, till it had inclosed the elevation;
when suddenly it shot up from every side in an hundred converging
tongues of flame, which, soon meeting and expanding
into one, quickly enveloped the whole hill in one broad, unbroken
robe of sheeted fire, encompassed and mounted the
veteran pine, and around its colossal trunk formed a huge,
whirling pyramid of mingling smoke and flame that rose to the
mid-heavens, shedding, in place of the darkened sun, a lurid
glare over the forest, and sending forth the stormy roar of a
belching volcano. The next moment a shower of cinders and
the burning fragments of twigs, bark, and boughs which had
been carried high up by the force of the ascending currents,
fell hot and hissing to the earth over every part of the adjoining
fields, to and even far beyond the spot where Elwood and his
wife were standing.

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Elwood, aroused from the
mute amazement with which he and his more terrified companion
had been beholding the scene, as soon as these indications
of danger were thus brought to his very feet. “Good Heavens!
this is more than I bargained for. See, — the fire is catching
on the stumps all over the field!”

“The house!” half-screamed Mrs. Elwood. “What is that
rising from the shingles up there near the top of the roof?”

“Smoke, as I am alive!” cried the other, in serious alarm, as
he glanced up to the roof, where several slender threads of
smoke were beginning to steal along the shingles. “Run,
Alice, run with the pails for the brook, while I throw up the
ladder against the gable. We must be lively, or within one
hour we shall be as houseless as beggars.”

“O, where is Claud? where is Claud?” exclaimed the

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

distressed wife and mother, as she flew to the house to do her
husband's bidding.

Yes, where was Claud? At the risk of the charge of purposely
tantalizing the reader, we must break off here, to follow
the young man just named, in the unexpected adventures which
he also had experienced during that eventful day. But for
this we will take a new chapter.

p720-073 CHAPTER VI.

“To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely, been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean, —
This is not Solitude: 't is but to hold
Converse with nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd.”

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

It was about the middle of the forenoon, on the day marked
by the incidents narrated in the preceding chapter, when Claud
Elwood, who had become pretty well initiated into the sports
of the locality, entered his light canoe, with his fishing-tackle and
fowling-piece, and pushed out upon the broad bosom of the
forest-girt Umbagog. Having had the best success, when up
on the lake the last time, on the western margin, he pulled away
in that direction, and, after rowing a couple of miles up the
lake, he laid down his oar, unrolled his elm-bark cable, and let
down his stone anchor, at a station a furlong or so from the
shore.

It was a beautiful spot, and a beautiful day to enjoy it in.
From the water's edge rose, deeply enshrouded in their bright
green, flowing, and furbelowed robes of thickly interwoven
pines, the undulating hills, back to the summit level of that long,
narrow tongue of forest land, which, for many miles, only separates
the Umbagog from the parallel Magalloway, the noble
stream that here comes rushing down from the British highlands,
to join the scarcely larger Androscoggin, almost at the
very outset of its “varied journey to the deep.” Turning from

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

this magnificent swell on the west, the eye, as it wandered to
the right over the bright expanse of intervening waters, next
rested on the long, crescent-shaped mountain ridge, behind which
slept, in their still deeper and wilder seclusion, the broad Mooseeluk-maguntic
and the Molechunk-a-munk, which, with the Umbagog,
make up the three principal links in this remarkable chain
of lakes. Still farther to the right lay the seemingly boundless,
rolling forests, forming the eastern and southern rim of this
basin of the lakes; whose gradually sloping sides, like some old
pinnacled city, were everywhere bristling with the giant forms
of the heaven-aspiring pine, and whose nearer recesses were
pierced, in the midst, by the long, lessening line of the gleaming
Umbagog; while around the whole circle of the horizon,
scattered here and there far back into the blue distance, rose
mountain after mountain in misty grandeur to the heavens.

After thus slowly sweeping the horizon, to note, for the
tenth time, perhaps, the impressive character of the scenery,
whose everywhere intermingling beauty and grandeur he was
never tired of contemplating, Claud withdrew his gaze, and
turned his attention to the more immediate object of his excursion.
After a few moments spent in regulating his hook and
line, he strung his angle-rod, and threw out to see whether he
could succeed in tempting, at that unfavorable hour, the fickle
trout from their watery recesses. But all in vain the attempt.
Not a trout was seen stirring the water at the surface, or manifesting
his presence around the hook beneath; and all the endeavors
which the tantalized angler made, by changing the bait,
and throwing the line in different directions around him, proved,
for the next hour, equally fruitless. While he was thus engaged,
intently watching his line, each moment expecting that
the next must bring him a bite, one of those peculiar, subdued,
but far-reaching sounds, which are made by the grazing of the oar
against the side of the boat in rowing, occasionally greeted his
ear from some point to the south of him; though, for a while,
nothing was to be seen to indicate by whom the sounds were

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

produced. Soon, however, a man in a canoe, who had been
coasting, unseen, along the indentures of the shore, and whom
Claud instantly recognized as Phillips, the hunter already
named, shot round a neighboring point, and, in a few minutes
more, was at his side.

“Well, what luck?” cheerily exclaimed Phillips, a keen,
hawk-eyed, self-possessed looking man, with a round, compact,
and sinewy frame. “What luck to-day, young man?”

“None whatever,” replied Claud, with an air of disappointment.

“I suppose so, unless you began before ten o'clock.”

“But why did you suppose so?”

“O, I knew it from my knowledge of human nature,” said
the hunter, humorously. “Trout are very much like other
folks, only a great deal more sensitive to heat. Now, you
don't see men, who are well fixed under a cool shade in a sweltering
hot day, very anxious to run out bare-headed in the sun,
when there is no call for it; much less, then, the trout, that
can't bear the sun and heat at all. Though there are, probably,
a ton of them within a stone's throw of us, not one will come
out with this bright sun; they are lying behind the rocks and
old logs at the bottom, and won't begin to circulate these three
hours.”

“And are you not a-going to try them?”

“I? No; I would as soon think of fishing now on the top
of these hills. Besides this, I have a different object. I am
bound to carry home something that will pass for fresh meat,
if it is nothing but a coon. I shall haul up my canoe somewhere
about here; follow up the lake-shore a mile or so, with
the idea of catching a deer in the edge of the water, come there
to keep off the flies; then, perhaps, cross over to the Magalloway,
down that, and over to this place; when, by way of topping
off, I will show you, by that time, if you are about here so
long, how trout are taken.”

So saying, the hunter dipped his springy oar into the water,

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

and, with a few vigorous strokes, sent his canoe to the shore,
and, having moored it to a root, he glided into the thickets, and
disappeared with a tread so noiseless as to leave Claud, for
many minutes, wholly in doubt whether the man was standing
still in the bushes or proceeding on his excursion.

It was now noon, and Claud, seeing no prospect of any immediate
success in his piscatory employment, which had been
made to appear to him, by the remarks of the hunter, more discouraging
than ever, drew up his anchor, and rowed to a point
of the shore which was embowered by a group of magnificent
pines. Here, finding a cool spring, as well as a refreshing
shade, he drew out his lunch, and very leisurely proceeded to
discuss it, with the ice-cold water of the spring by which he
had seated himself for the purpose. His fare was coarse; but it
was partaken with a relish of which those who have never experienced
the effects of the air and exercise, incident to a life
in the woods, can have no just conception; and to which the
palled appetite of the


“vain lords of luxury and ease,
Whom slumber soothes not, pleasure cannot please,”
is poor in comparison, though all the king's banquets and metropolitan
feasts in the world should vie together to make good
the substitute. Claud's life had thus far been, in the main, a
quiet and commonplace one; nothing having occurred to him
to arouse those strong and over-mastering passions to which it
is the lot of most of us, at some period of our lives, to become
subjected. It had been checkered, however, by one bit of romance,
which, to say the least, had greatly excited his imagination.
About a year previous to the time of which we are now
writing, and one day while he was walking the streets of Boston,
a small, closely-enwrapped package was put in his hand
by an unknown boy, who, with the simple announcement, “For
you, Sir,” turned quickly away, and made off with the air of
one who has completed his mission, and would avoid being

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

questioned. Glancing within the wrapper, and perceiving it
inclosed a small encased picture, or likeness, of some female,
which he thought must have been delivered to him through mistake,
Claud looked hastily round for the messenger, and, not seeing
him, he walked backward and forward along the street, and
lingered some time in the vicinity, still expecting the boy would
soon return to claim the package. But, being disappointed in
this, he went home, and, retiring to his room, undid the wrapper,
which he carefully but vainly examined for some name,
mark, or other clue to the mystery; and then, with much interest,
fell to inspecting the picture. It was, obviously, a well-painted
miniature likeness of a fair, dark-eyed girl, but representing
no remembered face, except in the peculiar expression
of the strong and commanding countenance; which, he thought,
either in man or woman, he must have somewhere before encountered.
The whole likeness, indeed, together with the circumstances
under which it came into his hands, made, at the
time, a lively impression on his mind; and, keeping the affair
wholly to himself, he often contemplated that fair face in private;
and, for months afterwards, he never was in a public assembly,
where the sex were present, without running his eye
over it in search of the original. But, as he never found it, the
impression gradually wore away, and, in the exciting changes
that had occurred in the fortunes of his family, it had been
nearly obliterated from his mind; when, that morning, while
searching his trunk for some implement belonging to his gun,
he came across the minature, and put it in his pocket. And
now, in the leisure that followed his repast, he bethought him of
it; and, laying it before him on the bed of moss on which he was
reclining, he contemplated it with renewed interest, and that sort
of dreamy enthusiasm which the sudden revival of old associations
in such solitudes is apt to awaken in the mind, especially
when those associations are connected, as now, with a matter of
mystery and romance.

After indulging in his reveries a while, he put up his

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

miniature, aroused himself from his day-dream, and rose to his feet
when, feeling inclined for some kind of action, he decided on a
short excursion in the woods, in the direction of the Magalloway,
where probably he would fall in with Phillips, and return with
him to the lake. Accordingly, after loading his gun with ball
and buckshot, so as to be prepared for any large wild animals
he might chance to encounter, he leisurely took his way through
the heavy, ascending forest that lay in his course; here pausing
to note the last night's bed of some solitary bear, and there to
trace the marks of the death-struggle of a victim deer, that, with
all its vigilance and wondrous agility, had been surprised and
brought down by the stealthy and far-leaping catamount. The
ever-varying tenants of the forest, also, were constantly presenting,
as he passed on, some novelty to attract his unaccustomed
eye; now in the smooth, tall shaft of the fusiform fir — the
dandy of the forest — standing up with its beautiful cone-shaped
top among its rougher neighbors, trim and straight as the bonnetted
cavalier of the old pictures, among the slouchy forms of
his homelier but worthier opponents; now in the low and stocky
birch standing on its broad, staunch pedestal of strongly-braced
roots below, and throwing out widely above its giant arms, as if
striving to shoulder and stay up the weight of the superincumbent
forest; and now in the imperial pine, proudly lifting its
tall form an hundred feet over the tops of the plebeian trees
around, to revel in the upper currents of the air, or bathe its
crowning plumes of living green in the clouds of heaven.

Proceeding in this manner, he at length found himself gradually
descending the western slope of the hill; when he soon
arrived in the vicinity of the river, a glimpse of which, together
with a small clearing and a tidy-looking cottage on its banks,
he now caught through the tops of the intervening trees. While
still walking on, his attention was attracted to a comparatively
open place in the woods, where, at some previous period, a
severe fire had killed all the smaller trees, and consumed the
underbrush, which had been replaced by scattering shrubs of the

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

white poplar intermingled with a plentiful growth of the blackraspberry,
whose luscious fruit — the first to reward the
pioneer, and for which he has to contend sharply with the birds
and bears to obtain his share — was now beginning to ripen.
As he was entering this open space, which appeared to extend
some distance round the point of a screening knoll, he was suddenly
brought to a stand by a noise somewhere in the bushes
or woods ahead, such as had never before saluted his ears. It
was like nothing else, or if any thing else, like the wild snorting
of a frightened horse prolonged into the dying note of the
steam whistle. Claud recoiled a step before the unaccustomed
sound, and involuntarily cocked and raised his gun to his
shoulder. But he was allowed no time to speculate. The
next instant, the loud and piercing shriek of a female, nearer
but in the same direction, rose and rang through the forest.
With a speed quickened at every step by the rapidly repeated
cry of distress, he bounded towards the spot, when, turning the
point of the knoll, he suddenly found himself in full view of
the object of his solicitude, — a girl, in the full bloom of youthful
beauty, who, with bonnet thrown back and her loosened
hair streaming in wild disorder over her shoulders, instantly
rushed forward for his protection. claud stopped short, in
mute surprise at the unexpected apparition; for the first glance
at her face told him that the original of his mysterious miniature
was before him, — before him, here in the woods! Breathless
and speechless in her wild affright, she pointed, with a
glance over her shoulder, to a thick, high tangle of large,
strongly limbed, knotty, windfallen trees, a short distance
behind her, and fled past him to the rear. Looking in the
indicated direction, the startled and perplexed young man distinguished
the outlines of a monstrous moose madly plunging
at the woody barrier, and trying to force his enormous antlers
through the unyielding limbs preparatory to leaping it in pursuit
of his victim, who had eluded the infuriated animal, and
barely escaped the fatal blows of his uplifted hoofs, by creeping

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

under the providentially placed obstruction. Claud instantly
raised his piece, when, feeling uncertain of his aim, he withheld
his fire, and stood waiting for a fairer view. But, before he
could obtain it, the moose, tired of vain attempts to force
his passage through the bristling barricade of logs and limbs
before him, disappeared for one moment, but the next came
crashing round the nearest end of it, and, with renewed demonstrations
of rage and hostility, made directly for the new opponent
he beheld in his way. Still unalarmed for his own safety,
Claud waited with levelled gun till his formidable assailant
was within forty yards of him, when he took a quick aim and
fired. Reeling under the discharge of his heavily loaded
piece, and blinded by the smoke, he could not, at first, see the
effect of his fire; but when he did so, the next instant, it was
only to behold the monster brute, maddened, not stopped, by
the flesh wounds inflicted, rushing on him with a force and fury
which compelled him to leap suddenly aside, to avoid being
beat into the earth by those terrible hoofs, which he saw lifted
higher and higher, at each approaching step, for his destruction.
Mindful, in his peril, of the precautions already learned from
the hunters, Claude, while the moose, whose tremendous impetus
was driving him straight ahead, could break up, so as to turn
in the pursuit, — Claud made, with all the speed of which he
was master, for a huge hemlock, luckily standing at no great
distance on his right; a course which he thought would divert
the monster from pursuit of the maiden, and, at the same time,
best insure his own safety. But, so prodigious was the rushing
speed of the foiled and now doubly exasperated moose, that
the imperilled huntsman had barely time to reach the sheltering
tree and dodge behind it, before the hotly pursuing foe was at
his heels, rasping and tearing with his spiked antlers the rough
bark of the tree, in his attempts to follow round it near and
fast enough to overtake and strike down his intended victim.
Round and round then sped both pursuer and pursued, as fast
as the frantic rage of the one, and the keen instinct of

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

self-preservation in the other, could impel them. Although the
moose, from the great width of his interfering horns, was compelled
to sweep round the tree in a circle requiring him to go
over double the distance travelled by Claude, yet so much
greater was his speed, that it called for the utmost exertions
of the latter to keep clear of the battle-axe blows which he
heard falling every instant with fatal force behind him. His
gun had already been struck, shivered, and beat from his hand;
and, as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the fierce and
glaring eyes of his ruthless pursuer, and his uplifted and forward-thrown
hoofs striking closer and closer to his heels at
every bound, a sense of his deadly peril flashed over his mind
with that strange and paralyzing effect which the first full conviction
of impending death often produces on the stoutest
hearts. He felt his strength giving way, his brain beginning
to whirl, and he was on the point of yielding himself to his
fate; when a stream of smoke and flame accompanied the
startling report of a rifle, shot out from the edge of a neighboring
thicket. The moose gave a convulsive start, floundered
forward on his knees, swayed backward and forward an instant,
then fell over broad-side into the bushes with a heavy crash,
straightened out, gasped, and died.

“Dunno but you'll think I waited too long, young man,”
cried Phillips, now advancing with a quick, leaping step from
his covert. “The fact was, I felt, on seeing you getting into
such close quarters, that I had better be rather particular
about my aim, so as to stop him at once; besides that, I was at
first a little out of breath. I had heard the fellow blow when
an hundred rods off, — then the woman scream, — then your
gun; and, thinking like enough there would be trouble, I legged
it for the spot, and got to my stand just as he treed you.”

“I feel very grateful to you, Mr. Phillips, for this timely
rescue,” responded Claud, recovering his composure. “This, I
suppose, is the far-famed moose?”

“Yes, and a bouncer at that,” replied the hunter, going up

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

and, placing his foot on the broad and still quivering flank of
the huge animal. “Good twenty hands high, and weighs,
well, not much short of fifteen hundred, I should say.”

“But are they often thus dangerous?” asked Claud.

“Not very often, perhaps,” rejoined the hunter. “But still
the bull moose, at this season of the year, is sometimes, when
wounded, about as ugly a customer as you meet with in the
woods. This fellow I judge to have been oncommon vicious, as
he begun his tantrums before he was touched at all, it seems.
I dunno but 'twas the woman put the devil into him, as women
do into two-legged animals sometimes, — don't they, young
man?”

“The woman? O yes, the young lady,” said Claud, reminded
of his duty as a gallant by the remark, though unwilling
to appropriate to himself the prophetic joke with which it
was coupled. “Where is she? I must go and see to her.”

“She has already seen to herself, I guess,” said the hunter.
“As I was coming up, I glimpsed her cutting round and running,
like a wild turkey, for the clearing, to which the moose
had cut off her retreat. She has reached the house by this
time, doubtless; for it is hard by, down on the river here, a
hundred rods or such a matter.”

“Who is she? Do you know the family?” eagerly inquired
the young man.

“No,” answered the hunter. “They are new-comers in
these parts.”

“What could have brought her here so far into the woods?”
persisted Claud.

“The raspberries, very likely,” said the other, indifferently,
while taking out and examining the edge of his knife. “But
come, we must get this moose into some condition, so that he will
keep; then be off to let the settlers know of our luck. And
early to-morrow morning, we will, all hands, come up the
river in boats, and distribute him. He will make fresh meat
enough to supply the whole settlement.”

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

The hunter now, with the assistance of his new pupil in the
craft, proceeded to dressing the moose, the process of which,
bleeding, disemboweling, and partially skinning, was soon completed;
when, cutting some stout green skids with the hatchet
he ever carried in his belt, and inserting the ends under the
bulky carcass, the two contrived to raise it, by means of old
logs rolled up for the purpose, several feet from the ground, so
as to insure a free circulation of air beneath it. This being
done, the hunter kindled two log fires, one on each side, to
keep off, he said, the wolves and other carnivorous animals.
They then, after cutting out the tongue and lip, which are
esteemed the tidbits of this animal, took up their line of march
for the lake, which, with the long, rapid lope of the woodsman,
measured off, as usual, in Indian file, and with little or no
interrupting conversation, they reached in a short time, and
without further adventure.

“Now,” said the hunter, as he reached the spot where his
canoe was tied, and turned round towards his lagging companion, —
“now, sir, what say you to taking a five-pound
trout?”

“Perfectly willing,” replied Claud, smiling; “and I would
even take up with a smaller one.”

“Well, I won't, — that is, not much smaller; and I think I'll
have one of at least the size I named.”

“What makes you so confident?”

“Because, it being a hot, shiny morning, they took to their
coverts early, and must be sharp-set, by this time. Besides
that, it is just about the best time for them that could be got
up: a deep cloud, as you see, is coming over the sun, and this
wind is moving the water to the bottom. All sizes will now
be coming out, and the big ones, like big folks, will make all
the little ones stand back till their betters are served.”

Each now taking to his canoe, they pushed out some twenty
or thirty rods into the lake, cast anchor, and threw out their
lines. Claud, who baited with grubs, soon had drawn in two,

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

weighing as many pounds a piece, and began to feel disposed
to banter the hunter, who had baited with a flap of moose-skin,
which he had brought along with him, and which, to Claud,
seemed little likely to attract the fishes to his hook. But he
soon found himself mistaken; for, turning to give utterance to
what was passing in his mind, he beheld the other dallying
with a trout, which he had hooked, and now held flapping on
the surface of the water, evidently much larger than either of
his own.

“That is a fine one!” cried Claud. “Why don't you pull
him in?”

“Not big enough,” said the hunter, in reply to the question;
while he turned to the fish with an impatient “Pshaw! what
work the cretur makes of it! Hop off, hop off, you fool!
There,” he added, as the trout at length broke away and disappeared,
“there, that is right. Now be off with yourself
till you grow bigger, and give me a chance at the fine fellow
whose tail I saw swashing up round here just now.”

The hunter then carefully adjusted his bait, and threw out
the whole lingth of his line. After alternately sinking his hook,
and then drawing it to the surface, for two or three throws, the
line suddenly straightened, moved slowly backward at first,
then swept rapidly round and round, or darted off in sharp
short angles, with downward and forward plunges so quick and
powerful as to make the stout sapling pole sway and bend, like
a whipstock, in the steadying hands of the hunter. For four
or five minutes he made no attempt to draw in his prize, but
let the fish have full play to the length of its tether, till its
efforts had become comparatively feeble; when, slowly bringing
it alongside, he took the line in his hand, and, with a quick
jerk, landed the noble fellow safely on the bottom of the
canoe.

“There, sir!” exclaimed the hunter, seizing the trout by the
gills, and triumphantly holding it up to view, “there is about
what I bargained for: two feet long, not an inch shorter, —

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

seven pounds weight, and not an ounce lighter! Now, being
satisfied, I am done.”

“What, leave off with such luck?” asked Claud in surprise.

“Yes, young man,” said the other, “I hold it all but a downright
sin to draw from God's storehouse a single pound more
than is really needed. This will last my family as long as it
will keep, this warm weather, with the plenty of moose-meat
we shall have. Any thing more is a waste, which I will not
commit. And you, sir, who have just hauled in your third and
largest one, I perceive, and have now nearly as many pounds
as I have, — what can you want of more? Come, let us pull
up and off for our homes. It is nearly time, any way.”

Although loth to break off his sport, yet inwardly acknowledging
the justness of the hunter's philosophy, Claud reluctantly
drew in and wound up his line, hauled in his anchor, and,
handling his oar, shot out abreast of the other, who had already
got under way, into the heaving waters of the now
agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of
their elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp
canoes, dug out to the thinness of a board from the straightgrained
dry pine, rapidly ahead over the broken and subdued
waves of the cove, in which they had been stationed, till they
rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off the
view of the lower end of the lake.

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Claud, starting back, with suspended
oar, as now, coming out in view of the lake, his eye fell
on the huge pillar of smoke, which, deeply enshrouding that part
of the distant forest lying east of the outlet of the lake with its
expanded base, was rolling upward its thousand dark, doubling
folds; “good Heavens, Phillips, look yonder! Where and what
is it? It looks like a burning city.”

“It is a fire, of course, and no small one, either; but where,
I can't exactly make out,” slowly responded the hunter, intently
fixing his keen eyes on the magnificent spectacle which had
thus unexpectedly burst on their view in the distance. “Let

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

me see,” he continued, running his eye along the border of the
lake in search of his old landmarks: “there is the tall stub
that stands half a mile down on the west bank of the river, and
is now just visible in the edge of the smoke; but where is the
king pine, that stands nearly against it, over in your slash?
Young man,” he added, with a startled air, “was your father
calculating to burn that slash to-day?”

“No, unless it looked likely to rain.”

“Well it does look likely to rain, in the shape of a shower
gathering yonder, which has already given out one or two
grumbles of distant thunder, if my ears served me as well as
usual.”

“Yes; but such a smoke and fire can't come from our slash.
It must be a larger and more distant one.”

“So I thought at first; but I begin to think different. Do
you see that perpendicular, broken line of light, occasionally
flashing out from the smoke, and extending upward to a height
that no ground fire ever reached? That is your king pine in
a blaze from bottom to top. Hark! why, I can hear it roaring
clear here, like a distant hurricane. It must be a prodigious
hot fire to make all that show and noise.”

“Can it endanger our buildings?” asked Claud, in alarm.

“I am afraid so,” replied the other, with a dubious shake of
the head. “But hark again! 'tis your father's horn blowing
for help.”

“Let us row, then, as for our lives!” cried the now thoroughly
aroused and agitated young man. “If any thing happens
before I get there, I shall never forgive myself for my
prolonged absence, to the last day of my life. You will join
me in going there, will you not?”

“Yes, and outstrip you by half a mile. But that won't be
the best way. Throw your anchor into the stern of my canoe,
and fall in behind. There; now keep the anchor-line slack
between us, if you can,” rapidly said the hunter, bending his

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

sinewy form to the work, with a power that sent his canoe half
out of the water at every stroke of his swiftly-falling oar.

Leaving them to bound over the billowy waters of the lake
towards their destination, with all the speed which strong arms
and nerves made tense with excitement could impart, let us
anticipate their arrival, to note what befell the objects of their
anxieties, whom we so abruptly left in their perils from the
fire, to bring up the other incidents of the day having an equal
bearing on the story, with which we have thus far occupied
the present somewhat extended chapter.

The immediate danger to their house from the fire, with
which we left the alarmed Elwood and his wife contending, was,
indeed, easily overcome by dashing pails of water over the
roof. But scarcely had they achieved this temporary triumph
in one place over an element proverbially terrible when it
becomes master, before it was seen kindling into flickering
blazes on the roof of the barn and the locks of hay protruding
from its windows and the crevices between the logs of which
it was built. Here, also, they soon succeeded in extinguishing
the fire in the same manner. They were not, however, allowed
a moment's respite from either their labors or alarms. The
fences were by this time on fire in numerous places; and the
chips and wood in the door-yard were seen to be igniting from
the sparks and cinders which, every instant, fell thicker and
hotter around their seemingly devoted domicil. The fences,
after a few vain attempts to save them, were given up a prey
to the devouring element, and the whole exertions of the
panting and exhausted sufferers were turned to saving their
buildings; and even at that they had no time to spare; for, so
hot had the air become from the burning slash, which,
through its whole length, was now glowing with the red heat
of a furnace, that every vestige of moisture had soon disappeared
from the drenched roofs, and they were again on fire.

“Is there no way of raising help?” exclaimed Mrs. Elwood,

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

in her extremity, as she witnessed these increasing manifestations
of danger.

“I never thought of that,” said Elwood. “Hand me the
dinner-horn. If there are any within hearing, they will understand,
with the appearance of this fire, that we are calling for
assistance.”

With a few sharp, loud blasts, Elwood threw aside the horn,
and again flew to the work of extinguishing the fires where
they became most threatening. And thus, for nearly another
hour, the distressed settler and his heroic wife, suffering deeply
from heat and exhaustion, toiled on, without gaining the least
on the fearful enemy by which they were so closely encompassed.
And they were on the point of giving up in despair,
when the welcome shout of “Help at hand!” from the ringing
voice of the hunter, then just entering the opening, revived
hope in their sinking hearts. The next moment that help was
on the spot; but it was unnecessary. A mightier Hand was
about to interpose. From the bold, black van of the hurrying
and deeply-charged rack of cloud, that had now unheeded
gained the zenith, a stream of fire, before which all other fires
paled into nothing, at that instant descended on the top of
the burning pine, and, rending it from top to bottom by the
single explosion, sent its wide-flying fragments in blazing circles
to the ground. A sharp, rattling sound, terminating in a cannon-like
report, followed, shaking the rent and crashing heavens
above, and the bounding earth beneath, in the awful concussion.
Before the stunned and blinded settlers had recovered from the
shock, or the deep roll of the echoing thunder had died away
among the distant mountains, another and more welcome roar
saluted their ears. It was that of the rapidly-approaching rain
striking the foliage of the neighboring forest; and, scarcely had
they time to gain the cover of the house, before the deluging
torrents poured over it with a force and fury beneath which
the quelled fires speedily sunk, hissing, into darkness and death.

p720-089 CHAPTER VII.

“Wo is the youth whom Fancy gains,
Winning from Reason's hands the reins.”

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

The morning of the next day, serene and beautiful as a
bride decked in her fresh robes and redolent in her forest perfumery,
came smiling over the wilderness hills of the east, to
greet our little pioneer family on their deliverance from the
perils of yesterday. The war of the elements, that had raged
so fearfully round their seemingly devoted domicile, had all
passed away; and, after sleeping off the fatigue and excitement
of the previous day, they rose to look around them, to
find themselves safe, and call themselves satisfied. Their buildings
had been, after all, but very slightly injured, and their
green crops but little damaged; their fences, indeed, were
mostly consumed; but these could be replaced from the timber
of the burnt slash, with little more labor than would be required
to pile up and burn that timber where it lay. But, whatever
such additional labor might be, it was more than compensated
by the very intensity of the fire which caused it, and which, at
the same time, had so utterly consumed all the underbrush,
limbs of the trees, and even the smaller trees themselves, that
weeks less than with ordinary burns would be required in the
clearing. Elwood, therefore, came in from his morning survey
happily disappointed in the supposed extent of his losses; and,
joining his wife and son in the house, whom he found busily
engaged in cutting up, mealing, and placing in the hissing pan
over the fire the broad, red, and rich-looking pieces of trout,
the fruit of yesterday's excursion on the lake, he told them,
with a gratified air, the result of his observation, which, on a

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

merchant-like calculation of loss and gain from the conflagration,
he made out to show even a balance in his favor. Mrs.
Elwood rejoiced with her husband on the happy turn of affairs,
and wondered why her son did not manifest the same flow of
spirits. But the latter, for some reason or other, appeared unusually
abstracted during the whole morning; and, when asked
to relate the particulars of his perilous adventure with the
moose, which he had the evening before but briefly mentioned,
he exhibited a hesitation, and a sort of shying of the question,
in that part of the adventure relating to the rescued girl,
which did not escape the quick eye of the mother. It was evident
to her that something was kept back. But what that
something was she was wholly unable to conjecture. It was so
unusual for her son to show any lack of frankness that the
circumstance disturbed her, and, though she knew not exactly
why, sent a boding chill over her heart, which caused her also
to become thoughtful and silent. And Mr. Elwood, who possessed
none of those mental sympathies which, in some, will
often be found unconsciously mingling with the thoughts of
others, so far, at least, as to apprise them of the general character
and drift of those thoughts, now, in his turn, wondered
why his wife, as well as son, should all at once become so unsocial
and taciturn.

It will doubtless be generally said that this mental sympathy,
or the intuitive perception of the main drift of what is passing
in the minds of others, has an existence only in the fancy of
fictionists. We, however, after years of close observation, have
wholly ceased to doubt its reality. Scores of times have we
been affected by thoughts and intentions which we knew must
have a source other than in our own mind. Scores of times
have we, in this manner, been put on our guard against the
selfish designs which others were harboring to our disadvantage,
of which no tongue had informed us, and of which, afterwards,
we had tangible proof. And, on careful inquiry among persons
of thought and sensibility, we have become convinced that

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

the principle holds good to a very considerable extent among
others; and that attention to the subject is only wanting to
make it a generally received opinion. It was this principle
that now affected Mrs. Elwood: not that she had the most distant
idea that her son harbored aught of wrong intention toward
any of his family, but she felt that his mind was somehow
becoming subservient to schemes which existed somewhere in
the minds of others, which concerned her or her family. But
she felt rather than thought this; and, knowing she could give
no reason for her singular impression, prudently kept it to herself.

“Good-morning, good-morning, gentlefolks,” rang out the
cheery voice of the hunter, who now looked in at the door as
the Elwoods were rising from their breakfast. “Things look
a little altered round here, this morning. I should hardly have
known the place without the king pine, which, in its prime, was
a tree of a thousand.”

“That tree was an old acquaintance of yours, I suppose,”
remarked Elwood.

“Yes, of twenty years' standing; and I shall miss and mourn
it as an old friend. But it died like a monarch, yielding only
under the direct blow of the Almighty.”

“Then you consider the lightning more especially the instrument
of Heaven than the wind, fire, and other elements, do
you?”

“To be sure I do. Wind, we know what it is; fire we know;
water we also know; because we can see them, touch them,
measure them. But who can see a piece of lightning when not
in motion? who can find the least fragment of it after it has
struck? It rends a tree, makes a smooth hole through a
board, and ploughs up the ground. But go to the tree, and
there is nothing there; look under the board, it is the same;
and dig along the furrow it has ploughed to where it stopped,
and it is not there, as it would be if it was any material thing,
like a bullet, an axe, knife, or other instrument that produces

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

such effects, in all other instances. No, 'tis not matter; it is
the power of God; and your philosophers, who pretend to
explain it, don't know what they are talking about. But enough
of that. I came here to rally you out to go up the river with
the rest of us, for the moose. You will both go, won't you?”

“Claud will, doubtless,” replied Mr. Elwood. “Indeed, I
have half a mind to go myself.”

“Perhaps Claud, having had a fatiguing excursion yesterday,
will stay at home, and let his father go, to-day,” suggested
Mrs. Elwood.

“It was not at all fatiguing, mother,” responded Claud.

“The wind blows up the river to-day, ma'am,” said the hunter,
with a knowing look.

Little more was said; but the result was that Claud and the
hunter now soon went off together on the proposed excursion.
On reaching the mouth of the Magalloway, they found four
others waiting for them, with their canoes, when the whole
party commenced their little voyage up the river. After leisurely
rowing against the here slow and gentle current of the
stream for an hour or two, they reached their destination, and
hauled up at a point most convenient for gaining the spot where
the slaughtered moose had been left the evening before. Led
on by the hunter, all now started for the place just named,
except Claud, who, under pretence of taking a short gunning
bout in the woods, and of soon coming round to join his companions,
proceeded, as soon as the latter were out of sight, with
slow and hesitating steps, up the river, for the opening and
supposed residence of the fair unknown who had so long been
the object of his wondering fancies, and who had, notwithstanding
the exciting scenes he had witnessed at home, been the
especial subject of his dreams after he retired to rest the night
before. But what a strange, wayward, timid, doubting, and
inconsistent thing is the tender passion in its incipient stages,
especially when that passion has principally been wrought up
by the imagination! He soon came to the clearing of which

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

he was in quest, and obtained a clear view of the, to him, charmed
cottage. But, instead of entering the opening directly, he went
nearly round it, frequently pausing and advancing nearly to
the edge of the woods; but as often retreating, being unable
quite to make up his mind to show himself at all to the inmates
of the cottage. Once he gave it up entirely, and started off
for his companions. But, after he had proceeded a dozen rods,
he came again to a stand, hesitated a while, and, as if ashamed
of his irresolution, wheeled rapidly about, proceeded, with a
quick, firm step, to the border of the woods, struck directly for
the house, and, with assumed unconcern, marched up to the
door, — where he was met, not by the young lady he expected
first to see, but by her father. But who was that father? To
his utter surprise, it was his father's old tempter and ruiner,
the dark and inscrutable Gaut Gurley!

With a manner, for him, unusually gracious, Gurley extended
his hand to Claud; ushered him into the house; formally introduced
him to his wife, an ordinary, abject-looking woman; and
then to his daughter, the fair, dark-eyed, tall, shapely, and
every way magnificent Avis Gurley, the girl who had so long,
but unwittingly, been the object of the young man's dreamy
fancies.

“I have but very lately discovered,” remarked Gurley, who
seemed to feel himself called on to lead off in the conversation,
after the usual commonplace remarks had been exchanged,
“I have but lately discovered that I had, by a singular coincidence,
again cast my lot in the same settlement with your
family. Having made up my mind, a few months ago, to try
a new country, and coming across the owner of this place, who
was on a journey in New Hampshire, and who offered to sell
and move off at once, I came on with him, struck a bargain,
returned for my family, and brought them here about a fortnight
ago. But, having been absent most of the time since, I didn't
mistrust who my neighbors were.”

“And you probably perceived, sir,” said Avis, turning to

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

Claud, with a smile, “you probably perceived, in your yesterday's
adventure up here in the woods, that I have been in as
bad a predicament as my father.”

“How is that, Avis?” asked Gurley.

“Why, father,” responded the other, “Mr. Elwood will
readily suppose that I should not have been straying into the
wood for flowers and berries, had I known we had any such
neighbors as the one from whose pursuit he so kindly rescued
me last evening.”

“I was as much surprised at the ferocity of the animal as you
were, I presume,” said Claud, in reply. “And I was far more
indebted to the hunter, Phillips, for my own rescue, than you
were to me for yours. I merely turned the furious brute aside.
It was he who, coming up in the nick of time, brought him
dead to the earth.”

“I supposed there were two of you,” remarked Gurley. “I
was half a mile up the river, yet I heard the firing plain enough;
and, returning soon after, and hearing my daughter's story, I
went to the place; but, by that time, you had dressed the animal
and were gone. By the voices I heard in the woods, a
short time ago, I concluded you came up, with others, for the
beef.”

“We did. You here should certainly be entitled to a liberal
share. Will you not go up there?”

“Yes; I was thinking about it before you came in. I will
go; but, as I wish to go a short distance into the woods, partly in
another direction, I will now walk on and come round to the
spot; and, if I don't meet you there, you may just tell your
father how surprised I have been to find myself again in the
same neighborhood with himself.”

“Umph!” half audibly exclaimed the hitherto mute wife,
with a look that seemed to say, “What a bouncer he is telling
now!” and she was evidently about to say something, comporting
with the significant exclamation, but a glance from her husband,
as he passed out of the door, quelled her into silence.

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

On the departure of Gurley, his wife rose and left the room;
when Claud, unexpectedly finding himself alone with his fair
companion, instead of entering into the easy conversation with
her which the dictates of common gallantry would seem to require,
soon began to manifest signs of constraint and embarrassment,
which did not escape the eye of the young lady, and
which caused her no little surprise and perplexity. She knew
nothing of what had been passing in his mind, nor once dreamed
of the circumstance which had first impressed her image there.
She had, indeed, known nothing of the Elwoods, except what
she had heard her father say of them as a family, with whose
head he had in some way been formerly connected in business.
Had she been asked, she would doubtless have recalled the
fact that her father had, the year before, employed an artist to
paint a miniature likeness of her, which he subsequently pretended
to have sent to a relative of his residing in Quebec, and
she never entertained the least suspicion that it was not thus
properly disposed of. She had never seen Claud till yesterday,
when he so opportunely appeared for her rescue; and, even
then, she had no idea who it was to whom she had thus become
indebted. She, however, had been much prepossessed with
his appearance and manly bearing, and felt a lively sense of
gratitude for the voluntary service; and when, by the introduction
of her father, she became apprised of the character of her
deliverer, she felt doubly gratified that he had turned out to be
one who, she believed, would not take any mean advantage of
the obligation. For these reasons, she could not understand
why he should appear so reserved, unless it was that she had
failed to interest him; and, finally concluding that this must be
the case, she did that which, with her maidenly pride and high
spirit, she would otherwise have scorned to do, she exerted herself
to the utmost to interest and please him; and, when he rose
to return to his companions, she followed him into the yard,
and smilingly said:

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

“You are fond of gunning excursions, are you not, Mr.
Elwood?”

“Yes, O yes, quite so,” replied Claud, with awkward hesitation.

“And would not an occasional excursion in this direction be
as pleasant as any other?” she asked, with playful significance.

But, instead of replying in the same spirit, the bewildered
young man turned, and sent a gaze into the depths of her lustrous
dark eyes, so serious and intense that it brought a blush
to her cheek; when, stammering out his intention of often taking
her house in his way in future, he hurriedly bade her good-by,
and departed, leaving her more perplexed than ever.

As for Claud, it would be difficult to describe his sensations
on leaving the house, or make any thing definite out of the
operations of his mind. Both heart and brain were working
tumultuously, but not in unison. The train which his imagination
had been laying was on the point of being kindled into a
blaze by the reality. He knew it; he felt it; but he knew
also that it was the part of wisdom to smother the flame while
it yet might be controlled. The unexpected and startling discovery
which he had just made, that the girl who had so
wrought upon his fancy, both when seen in the picture and met
in the original, was the daughter of Gaut Gurley, raised difficulties
and dangers in the path he found himself entering, which
his judgment told him could only be avoided by his immediate
desistance. For he was well aware how deeply rooted
was his mother's aversion to this man, and how fatal had
been his influence over his father, who had but a few months
before escaped from his toils, and then only, perhaps, because
there was no more to be gained by keeping him in them any
longer. A connection with the daughter, therefore, however opposite
in character from her father, would not only greatly mar
his mother's happiness, but in all probability lead to a renewal of
the intimacy between his father and Gurley; an event which he
himself felt was to be deprecated. But the Demon of Sophistry,

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

who first taught self-deceiving man how to make “the wish
father to the thought,” here interposing, whispered to the incipient
lover that his father had reformed, and why not then
Gaut Gurley? This reasoning, however, could not be made to
satisfy his judgment; and again commenced the struggle between
head and heart, one pulling one way and the other in
another way, — too often an unequal struggle, too often like one
of those contests between man and wife, where reason succumbs
and will comes off triumphant.

Such were the fluctuating thoughts and purposes which
occupied the agitated bosom of Claud Elwood, in his solitary
walk to the place where the boats had been left, and where the
subject was now driven from his mind, for a while, by the appearance
of his companions and the merry jokes of the hunter
They had cut up the moose meat, which they had found in
good condition, and brought all they deemed worth saving down
to the landing. And, being now ready to embark, they apportioned
the meat among the different canoes, and rowed with the
now favoring current rapidly down the river together till they
reached its mouth, when they separated, and bore their allotted
portions of the moose to their respective homes.

For the two succeeding days and nights the hapless Claud
was the prey of conflicting emotions, — the more oppressive
because he carefully kept them pent up in his own bosom. He
dared not make the least allusion before his parents to the lady
whom they knew he had rescued, or his visit to her home, for
he could not do so without revealing the fact that the dreaded
Gaut Gurley, with his family, had found his way into the
vicinity; while, if he did disclose this fact, he felt that he could
not hold up his head before them till he had conquered his
feelings towards the daughter. And sometimes he thought he
had conquered them, and resolved that he would never see her
again. But, brooding over his feelings in the solitudes of the
woods, he only cherished and fanned the flame he was thinking
to extinguish; and he again relapsed, — again paused, — again

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

“resolved, re-resolved, and did the same;” for, on the third
day, under the excuse of taking another excursion on the lake,
he was drawn, as surely as the vibrating needle to the pole, to
the beautiful load-star of the Magalloway.

Suspecting the state of young Elwood's feelings towards her,
and fearing that she might have been too forward in her advances
at their last interview, Avis Gurley, this time, received
him with a dignity and maidenly reserve, which, when contrasted
with her former sociability and cordiality of manner,
seemed to him like studied coolness. This soon led him, in
turn, to sue for favor. And so earnestly did he pursue his
object, that, before he was aware of what he was saying, he had
revealed the secret of his heart. She received his remarks in
respectful silence, but gave no indication by which he could
judge whether the inadvertent disclosure was pleasing or otherwise,
except what might be gathered from her increased cordiality
on other subjects, to which she now adroitly turned the
conversation. This was just enough to encourage him, and at
the same time leave him in that degree of doubt and suspense
which generally operate as the greatest incentive to persevere
in the pursuit of an object. It proved so in his case; and, to
this natural incentive to persevere, was now added another,
that of respect for her character, — a respect which every
hour's conversation with her enhanced, and which he might
accord to her with entire justice. Gaut Gurley, like many
other bad men, was proud of having a good daughter. He
early perceived that she inherited all that was comely and good
in him, physically and morally, without any of his defects or
faults of character. And, desirous so to rear her as to make
the most of her natural endowments, and so, at the same time,
that her character should not be marred by his example, he had
been at considerable expense with her education, and had even
deported himself with much circumspection in her presence.
This, as will be readily inferred of one of his designing character,
he did from a mixed motive: partly from parental pride

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

and affection, and partly to make her, through some advantageous
marriage, subservient to his own personal interests.

In this state of affairs between Claud and Avis, closed this,
their second interview. Another, and another, and yet another,
succeeded at brief intervals. And so rapid is the course of
love, when springing up in solitudes like these, where nothing
occurs to divert the gathering current, but every thing conspires
to increase it, — where to our young devotees all around them
seemed to reflect their own feelings, — where the æolian music
of the whispering pines that embowered their solitary walks
seemed but to give voice to the melody that filled their own
hearts, — where to them the birds all sang of love, — where
love smiled upon them in the pensive beams of the moon,
glistened in the stars, and was stamped on all the expanse of
blue sky above, and on all the forms of beauty on the green
earth beneath, — so rapid, we repeat, is the course of love, thus
born and thus fostered, that a fortnight had scarcely elapsed
before they had both yielded up heart and soul to the dominion
of the well-named blind god, and uttered their mutual vows of
love and constancy.

This was the sunshine of their love; but the storms were
already gathering in the distance.

p720-100 CHAPTER VIII.

“The sigh that lifts her breastie comes,
Like sad winds frae the sea,
Wi' sic a dreary sough, as wad
Bring tears into yer e'e.”

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

When Claud Elwood reached home, on the eventful visit to
the Magalloway which resulted in the exchange of vows between
him and Avis Gurley, as intimated at the close of the
last chapter, he at once suspected, from the sad and troubled
looks of his mother and the disturbed manner of his father,
that the secret of his late visits abroad, as well as of the unexpected
advent of the family visited, had, in some way, become
known to them in his absence. A feeling of mingled delicacy
and self-condemnation, however, prevented him from making
any inquiries; and, with a commonplace remark, which was
received in silence, he took a seat, and, with much inward
trembling, awaited the expected denouement. But it did not
come so soon nor in so harsh terms as he expected. There are
occasions when we feel so deeply that we are reluctant to begin
the task of unburdening our minds; and, when we do speak out,
it is oftener in sorrow than in anger. It was so in the present
instance. Mr. Elwood had that day been abroad among the
settlers, and, for the first time, learned not only that Gaut
Gurley had moved with his family into the settlement, but that
Claud was courting his daughter, and a match already settled
on between them. On his return home, Elwood felt almost as
much reluctance in making known his discoveries to his wife as
Claud had before him; for he well knew how deeply they
would disquiet her. But, soon concluding there would be no

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

wisdom in attempting concealment, he told her what he had
heard. As he had anticipated, the news fell like a sudden
thunderclap on her heart. She had experienced, indeed,
many strange misgivings respecting her son's late mysterious
absences; but she was not prepared for such a double portion
of ill-omened news as she deemed this to be, and it struck her
mute with dismay, for it at once brought a cloud over the
future, which to her eye was dark with portents. Elwood himself
was also obviously considerably disquieted by the news,
showing no little uneasiness and excitement, — an excitement,
perhaps, resembling that which is said to be manifested by a
bird in the presence of the devouring reptile. He doubtless
would gladly have been relieved from any further connection
with Gaut. He doubtless would gladly have avoided even the
slightest renewal of their former acquaintance. But, for reasons
which he had never disclosed, he felt confident he should not
long be suffered to enjoy any such exemption. And feeling,
for the same reasons, how weak he should be in the hands of
that man, he was troubled, far more troubled than he would
have been willing to own, at the discoveries of the day, even if
that part of it relating to the intimacy of his son and Gaut's
daughter should prove, as he believed, a mere conjecture.

It was at this juncture, and before a word of comment had
been offered either by Mrs. Elwood or her husband on the
news he had related, that Claud arrived and entered the room.

“Well, God's will be done!” sadly uttered Mrs. Elwood,
at length breaking the embarrassing silence, but without raising
her eyes from her work, which lay neglected in her lap.

“What does mother mean?” doubtfully asked Claud, turning
to his father.

“I have been telling her some unexpected news, which
greatly disturbs her mind, — more than is necessary, perhaps,”
replied the other, with poorly assumed indifference.

“What news?” rejoined the son, having made up his mind

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

that, if his own secret was involved, as he supposed, the long
dreaded eclaircissement might as well come now as ever.

“Why, that Gaut Gurley has moved with his family into
the settlement. And that is not all; but the rest of it, which
relates to a lately-formed intimacy between you and Gaut's
daughter, I presume is mere guess-work.”

Mrs. Elwood turned a searching glance to the face of her
son, and waited to hear his reply to the last remarks, but he
was silent; and the last gleam of hope, which had for the
moment lighted up the mother's countenance, faded like a
moon-beam on the edge of an eclipsing cloud; and, after a long
pause and silence which no one interrupted, she slowly and
sadly said:

“When I consented to leave the comforts and social blessings
to which I had been accustomed, and come into this lone
wilderness, with its well-known hardships and privations, my
great and indeed only motive was, to see my family placed
beyond the temptations of the city, and especially beyond the
fatal, and to me always mysterious, influence of that wicked
and dangerous man, Gaut Gurley. And with this object I
came cheerfully, gladly. And when I reached this place,
fondly hoping and believing we had escaped that man, and
were forever secure from his wiles, I became happy,— happier
than since I left my native hills in New-Hampshire. It soon
became to me, lone and dreary as it might appear to others, —
it soon became to me, in my fancied security from the evils we
had fled, a second Paradise. But to me it is a Paradise no
longer; the Serpent has found his way into our Eden; and,
not content with having beguiled and ruined one, must now
have the other so entangled in the toils that both will be kept
in his power.”

“You are going a great ways to borrow trouble, it appears to
me, Alice,” remarked Elwood, after a pause.

“It certainly seems so to me, also, mother,” said Claud. “You
cannot know but Gurley comes here with as honest purposes

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

as father. But, were it otherwise, the daughter should not be
held responsible for the faults of the father, nor, without good
reason, be accused of favoring any sinister designs he may
entertain.”

“Claud takes a just view of the case, on both points, I presume,”
rejoined Mr. Elwood. “As to Gurley, I know not
how, or why, he came here; nor do I wish or expect to have
any thing to do with him. And as to Claud, I trust he knows
enough to take care of himself.”

“You have both evaded the spirit of my remarks,” responded
Mrs. Elwood. “When I speak of Gaut Gurley's motives
and designs, you must know I judge from his past conduct.
Have either of you as safe grounds of judging him? And
when I allude to his daughter, I do so with no thought of holding
her amenable for the faults of her father, or even of assuming
the ground that she has inherited any of his objectionable
traits of character. I intend nothing of the kind, for I
know nothing of her. But I do say, that, whenever she marries,
she becomes the connecting link between her husband and
her father, the chain extending both ways, so as to bind their
respective families together, and give one the power and means
of evil which could in no other way be obtained. In view of
all these circumstances, then, I feel that a calamity is in store
for us. God grant that my fears and forebodings may prove
groundless.”

The husband and son were saved the difficult and embarrassing
task of replying, by the arrival of Philips, who, in
his free and easy manner, entired and took a seat with the
family.

“I came, gentlefolks,” said the hunter, after a few commonplace
remarks had been exchanged, — “I came to see if you
know what a `bee' means?”

“A bee? what, honey-bees?” asked Mr. Elwood, in surprise
at the oddness of the question.

“No, not a honey-bee, exactly, or a humble-bee, but a sort of

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

work-meeting of men or women, to help a neighbor to husk his
corn, for instance, build him a log house, or do off some other job
for him in a day, which alone would take him perhaps weeks.
These turn-outs we new settlers call `bees.' Nothing is more
common than for a man to get up a bee to knock off at once a
pressing job he wants done. And, when a new-comer appears
to be delicate about moving in the matter, the neighbors sometimes
volunteer, and get up a bee for him, among themselves.”

“I may have heard of the custom; but why do you say you
came to ask me if I know any thing about it?”

“Well, I kinder thought I would. You have a pretty stifflooking
burnt piece here to be logged off soon, have you not?”

“Why, yes.”

“And it would be a hard and heavy month's job for you
and the young man to do it, would it not?”

“The best part of a month, perhaps; but I was intending to
go at it in season, that we might get it all cleared and sown
by the middle of September; which must be done, if I join you
and the rest of the usual company in the fall trapping and
hunting expedition.”

“Of course you will join us. It is our main and almost only
chance here of getting any money.”

“So I have always understood, and therefore made up my
mind to go into it, if I can get ready. I have been down the
river to-day and engaged my seed wheat. To-morrow I
thought of going abroad again, to try to engage some help for
clearing the piece.”

“Well, you need not go a rod for that purpose.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have got up a bee for you in the settlement,
large enough, we think, to log off your whole piece in a day.”

“Indeed! Who has been so kind as to start such a project?”

“Several of us: Codman, that you may have seen, or at
least heard of, as the best trapper in the settlement, took upon

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

himself to enlist those round the southerly end of the lake,
where he lives; and I have arranged matters a little in this
section and on the river below. But, in justice, I should name,
as the man who has taken the most interest in the movement,
the new settler who has this summer come into the parts, and
made his pitch over on the Magalloway. His name is Gurley.”

A dead silence of several minutes ensued, during which Mrs.
Elwood looked sadly and meaningly from the husband to the
son, both of whose countenances seemed to fall and shrink before
her significant glances.

“Well,” at length resumed the hunter, perceiving no response
was to be made to his last remark, “seeing we had
got all arranged and ready, I came to notify you, so that you
should not be taken by surprise. We propose to be on the
ground, men and oxen, early day after to-morrow. There will
be fifteen or twenty of us, perhaps, with five or six yoke of
oxen, and like enough a stiff horse or two.”

“But how can I provision such a company on so short
notice?”

“No trouble about that. You have salt pork?”

“A good supply.”

“Corn meal?”

“Yes; and wheat flour, with fine new potatoes.”

“All right. I will take care of the rest. I will take the young
man, here, into my largest canoe, to-morrow morning, if he be so
disposed, and we will go up the lake, perhaps into the upper lake,
and it will be a strange case if we don't return at night with fish,
and I think flesh, enough to victual the company; and, in the
mean time, my women will come up and be on hand to-morrow
and next day, to help Mrs. Elwood do the baking and cooking.”

The friendly movement of the neighbors, thus announced,
was not, of course, to be opposed or questioned by those for
whose benefit it was intended, any further than Mr. Elwood
had done in relation to his ability to entertain the company so
well as their kindness deserved. Mr. Elwood and his son,

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

indeed, who had been dreading the hard job of clearing off
their land, were greatly gratified at the unexpected kindness.
And even Mrs. Elwood, pained and annoyed as she was by
the part taken by Gaut Gurley, whose only motive she believed
was to gain some advantage for meditated evil, entered cheerfully
into the affair, and joined her husband in handsome expressions
of acknowledgment to the hunter, and assurances of
doing their best to provide properly for the company. The
matter was therefore considered as settled; and the hunter
departed, to call, as he had proposed, early the next morning
for Claud, for an excursion up the lake, to procure fresh provissions
for the coming occasion.

The family were early astir the next morning, intent on their
respective duties in preparation for the appointed logging bee.
They had scarcely dispatched their breakfast, before the hunter,
as he had promised, called for Claud; when the two departed
together, with their guns and fishing gear, for the lake, whither
we propose to accompany them.

“Well, now, let us settle the order of the day,” said Phillips,
after they had reached the landing and deposited their luggage
in the canoe selected for the purpose.

“I am a companion of the voyage, to-day, and, as you know,
but a learner in these sports,” responded Claud. “You have
but to name your plan.”

“Well, my plan is this: to steer across and get up the lake
to the inlet and rapids which connect this to the next upper
lake, called by the Indians the Molechunk-a-munk; up these
rapids into that lake, where we will take a row of a few hours,
and home again by nightfall. In these rapids, going or returning,
we may safely count, at this season, on a plenty of trout;
and, on the borders of the lake beyond, I know of several
favorite haunts of the deer, one of which I propose to take into
the canoe as ballast to steady it for running the rapids, on our
way back.”

“What is the whole distance?”

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

“Four or five miles of this lake, as many of the river or
rapids, and as far into the upper lake as we please.”

“You are laying out largely for one day, are you not?”

“No, 'tis nothing. You see, I have brought round for our
use my best birch bark canoe. I have rowed her fifty miles a
day round the lakes many a time. We shall bound over the
lake in almost no time, and the rapids, which are the only drawback,
can soon be surmounted, by oar or setting-pole, or, what
may be cheapest, carrying the canoe round those most difficult
of passage. The boat does not weigh an hundred. I could
travel with it a mile on my head, as fast as you would wish to
walk without a pound of luggage. So, in with you, and I'll
show you how it is done.”

Accordingly they launched forth in their primitive craft,
which, as before intimated, was the once noted birch bark canoe
built by the hunter agreeably to the exact rules of Indian art.
Few, who have never seen and observed the process of constructing
this canoe, which, for thousands of years before the
advent of the white man, was the only craft used by the aborigines
in navigating the interior waters, have any idea how,
from such seemingly fragile materials, and with no other tools
than a hatchet, knife, and perhaps a bone needle, the Indian
can construct a canoe so extremely light and at the same time
so tough and durable. In building his canoe, which is one of
the greatest efforts of his mechanical skill, the Indian goes to
work systematically. He first peels his bark from a middlesized
birch tree, and cuts it in strips five or six inches wide,
and twelve, fifteen, or twenty feet long, according to the length
and size of the designed canoe. He then dries them thoroughly
in the sun, after which he nicely scrapes and smooths off the
outside. He next proceeds to soak these strips, which are thus
made to go through a sort of tanning process, to render them
tough and pliable, as well as to obviate their liability to crack
by exposure to the sun. After the materials are thus prepared,
he smooths off a level piece of ground, and drives around the

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

outside a line of strong stakes, so that the space within shall
describe the exact form of the boat in contemplation. Inside
of these stakes he places and braces up the wet and pliable
pieces of bark, beginning at the bottom and building up and
bending into form the sides and ends, till the structure has attained
the required height. In this situation it is left till it is
again thoroughly dried and all the pieces become fixed in shape.
A light inside framework is then constructed, resembling the
skeleton of a fish, and of dimensions to fit the canoe already
put in form in the manner we have described. The pieces of
cured material are then numbered and taken down; when the
architect, beginning at the bottom, lapping and sewing together
the different pieces, proceeds patiently in his work, till the
sides are built, the ends closed nicely up, and each piece lashed
firmly to the framework, which, though of surprising lightness,
is made to serve as keel, knees, and ribs of the boat. Every
seam and crevice is then filled with melted pitch. The Indian
then has his canoe fit for use; and he may well boast of a
boat, which, for combined strength and lightness, and especially
for capacity of burden, no art of the shipbuilder has ever been
able to surpass, and which, if it has not already, might serve
for a model of the best lifeboat ever constructed, in these days
of boasted perfection in marine arts and improvements.

Bounding over the smooth waters like a seabird half on
wing, our voyagers soon found themselves on the northerly
side of the lake; when, rounding a point, they began to skirt
the easterly shore of the bay that makes up to the inlet, at a
more leisurely pace, for the purpose of being on the lookout
for deer, which might be standing in the edge of the water
round the coves, to cool themselves and keep off the flies. Not
seeing any signs of game, however, they steered out so as to
clear the various little capes or woody points of land inclosing
the numerous coves scattered along the indented shore, and
struck a line for the great inlet at the head of the lake, which
they now soon reached, and commenced rowing against the

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

at first gentle and then rapid current, which here pours down
from the upper lakes, through the rocky and picturesque defiles,
in the form of a magnificent river, rivalling in its size the
midway portions of the Connecticut or Hudson.

“Now, young man,” said the hunter, laying aside his paddle
and taking up the strong, elastic setting-pole he had provided
for the occasion, “now you must look out for your balance.
The river, to be sure, is quite low, and the current, of course,
at its feeblest point; but we shall find places enough within
the next mile where the canoe, to go up at all, must go up like
the jump of a catamount. So, down in the bottom of the boat,
on your braced knees, with your haunches on your heels, and
leave all to me.”

“What! do you expect to force the canoe up rapids like
these?” asked Claud, in surprise, as he cast his eye over the
long reach of eddying, tumbling waters, that looked like a lessening
sheet of foam as it lay stretched upward in the distant
perspective.

“I expect to try,” coolly replied the hunter; “and, if you
lay asleep in the bottom of the canoe, I should expect to succeed.
And, as it is, if you can keep cool and obey orders, we
will see what can be done.”

Claud implicitly obeyed the directions of the hunter, without
much faith, however, in the success of his bold attempt. But
he soon perceived he had underrated the skill and strength of
arm which had been relied on to accomplish the seemingly
impossible feat. Standing upright and slightly bracing in the
bottom of his canoe, the hunter first marked out with his eye
his course through a given reach of the rock-broken and foaming
waters above; then, nicely calculating the resisting force
of each rapid to be overcome, and the required impetus, and
the direction to be given to his canoe to effect it, he sharply bid
Claud be on his guard, and sent the light craft like an arrow
into the boiling eddies before him. And now, by sudden and
powerful shoves, he was seen shooting obliquely up one rapid;

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

tacking with the quickness of light, and darting off zigzag
among the rocks and eddies towards another, which was in turn
surmounted; while the boat was forced, surging and bounding
forward, with increasing impetus, now up and now athwart the
rushing currents, till he had gained a resting-place in the still
water of some sheltering boulder in the stream, when he would
mark off, with a rapid glance, another reach of falls, and shoot
in among them as before. Thus, with the quick tacks and
turns and sudden leaps of the ascending salmon, and almost
with the celerity, he made his way up the long succession of
rapids, until the last of the series was overcome, and he found
himself safely emerging into the smooth waters of the beautiful
lakelet or pond which divides, in the upper portion of its
course, this remarkable stream. Another row of a mile or so
now brought the voyagers where the water again took the form
of a swift river, tumbling and foaming over the rocks, in the
last series of rapids to be overcome. These also were surmounted
in the same manner and with the same success as the
former.

But this part of the voyage was marked with an unexpected
adventure, and one which seemed destined to lead to the operation
of new and singular moral agencies, both in the near and
more distant future, having an important bearing on the fate
and fortunes of young Elwood. They had reached the last
and most difficult of all the rapids yet encountered, and were
resting, preparatory to the anticipated struggle, in a smooth
piece of water under the lee of a huge rock, on either side of
which the divided stream rushed in two foam-covered torrents,
with the force and swiftness of a mill-race; when they were
startled by the shrill exclamations of a female voice, in tones
indicative of surprise and alarm. The sounds, which came
from some unseen point not far above them in the stream,
were evidently drawing near at a rapid rate. Presently a
small Indian canoe, with a single female occupant, whose youth
and beauty, even in the distance, were apparent, shot swiftly

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

into view, and came tossing and whirling down the stream, unguided,
and wholly at the mercy of the crooked and raging
currents along which it was borne with the speed of the wind.
The imperilled maiden uttered a cry of joy at the appearance
of our voyagers, and held up the handle of a broken oar, to
indicate to them at once the cause of her fearful dilemma and
need of assistance.

“I will throw her one of our paddles, and she will best take
care of herself,” hurriedly exclaimed the hunter, seizing the
implement, and awaiting her nearest approach to throw it
within her reach.

The critical point was the next instant reached, but the
hunter, in his nervous anxiety and haste, made his throw a little
too soon and with too much force. The paddle struck directly
under the prow of the canoe, and shot beyond, far out of
reach of the expectant maiden's extended hands. Another
oar was hurled after her, with no better effect; when, for the
first time, a shade of despair passed over her agitated countenance;
for she saw herself rapidly drifting directly into the jaws
of a wild and fearful labyrinth of breakers not fifty yards below,
where, in all probability, her fragile canoe would be dashed to
pieces, and herself thrown against the slippery and jagged
rock, drawn down, and lost. Claud, who had witnessed, with
trembling anxiety, the hunter's vain attempts to place the means
of self-preservation in the hands of the maiden, and who now
perceived, in their full light, the perils of the path to which she
was helplessly hastening, could restrain his generous impulses
no longer; and, quickly throwing off his hat and coat, he leaped
overboard, dashed headlong into the current, and struck boldly
down it to overtake the receding canoe.

“Hold! madness! They will both perish together!”
rapidly exclaimed the hunter, surprised and alarmed at the rash
attempt of his young companion. “But I will share in their
dangers, — perhaps save them, yet.”

Accordingly he hastily headed round his canoe, and,

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

hazardous as he knew must be the experiment, sent it surging
down the current after his endangered young friends; for the
one, as will soon appear, was no less his favorite than the
other. In the mean time, Claud, in swimming over a sunken
rock, luckily gained a foothold, which enabled him to rise and
plunge forward again with redoubled speed; and, so well-timed
and powerful were his exertions, that he came within reach of
the stern of the fugitive canoe just as it was whirling round
sideways in the reflux of the waves caused by the water dashing
against a high rock standing partly in the current. It was
a moment of life or death, both to the man and maiden; for
the boat was on the point of going broadside over the first fall
into the wild and seething waters, seen leaping and roaring in
whirlpools and jets of foam among the intricate passes of the
ragged rocks below. Making sure of his grasp on the end of
the canoe that had been thus fortunately thrown within his
reach, the struggling Claud made an effort to draw it from the
edge of the abyss into which it was about to be precipitated;
but, with his most desperate exertions, he was barely enabled
to keep it in position, while his strength was rapidly giving
way. The unequal contest was quickly noticed by the hapless
girl; and, after watching a moment, with a troubled eye, the
fruitless efforts and wasting strength of the young man, she
calmly rose to her feet, exhibiting, as she stood upright in the
boat, with the spray dashing over her marble forehead and
long flowing hair, in the faultless symmetry of her person, the
beautiful cast of her features, and the touching eloquence of
her speaking countenance, a figure which might well serve as a
subject for the pencil of the artist.

“Let go, brave stranger,” she cried, in clear, silvery tones,
after throwing a grateful and admiring glance down upon her
gallant rescuer; “let me go, and save yourself. I can die as
befits a daughter of my people.”

“Hold on, there, Claud! Courage, girl! I see a way to
save you both,” at that critical instant rang above the roar of

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

the waters the sharp voice of the hunter, who, with wonderful
tact and celerity, had shot down obliquely across the main
current, out of it through a narrow side pass, down that and
round the intervening rocks, and was now driving with main
strength up another pass, abreast of the objects of his anxiety.
“There: now seize the head of my canoe, and hold on to both;
and, on your life, be quick!” he continued, shouting to the exhausted
young man, while he himself was struggling with all
his might to get and keep his boat in the right position among
the battling currents.

After one or two ineffectual attempts, Claud, with a last desperate
effort, fortunately succeeded in securing his grasp on the
hunter's boat, without losing his hold on the other; when, with
one mighty effort of the latter, they were all drawn out of the
vortex together, and soon brought safely to shore.

“Fluella, my fair young friend,” said the hunter, taking a
long breath, and respectfully turning to the rescued girl, as
the party stepped on to the dry beach, “I have not often — no,
never — felt more rejoiced than now, in seeing you stand here in
safety.”

“I know the danger I have been in,” responded the maiden,
feelingly. “O yes, know to remember, and know to remember,
also, those who made my escape. Mr. Phillips, I am grateful
much.”

“Don't thank me,” promptly replied the hunter. “I am
ashamed not to have been the first in the rescue, when the
chief's daughter was in danger.”

“But, Mr. Phillips,” rejoined the other, with an expressive
smile, “you have not told me who this stranger is, who seemed
to measure the value of his own life by such a worthless thing
as mine.”

“True, no,” returned the hunter; “but this gentleman, Fluella,
is young Mr. Claud Elwood, who, with his father and
mother, has recently moved into the settlement; and they are
now my nearest neighbors, at the foot of the lower lake. And

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

to you, Claud, I have to say, that this young lady is the daughter
of Wenongonet, the red chief, the original lord of these
lakes, and still living on the one next above.”

Both the maiden and her gallant young preserver seemed
equally surprised, at the announcement of each others' name and
character: the former, because it suggested questions in the
solution of which she felt an interest, but which, with the characteristic
prudence of her race, she forbore to ask; and the latter,
because he found it hard to realize that the fair-complexioned
and every way beautiful girl, who stood before him, readily speaking
his own language, and neatly and even richly arrayed in the
usual female habiliments of the day, with the single exception
of the gay, beaded moccasins, that enveloped her small feet and
ankles, — found it extremely difficult to realize that one of such
an exterior, and of so much evident culture, could possibly have
descended from the tawny and uncultivated sons of the forest.

“You two should hereafter be friends, should you not?”
observed the hunter, perceiving their mutual restraint, of which
he wished to relieve them.

Rousing himself, with a prompt affirmative reply to the question,
Claud gallantly advanced, and extended his hand to his
fair companion, who, with evident emotion, and a slight suffusion
of the cheek, gave him her own in return, as she said:

“O yes. Mr. Phillips' friend is my friend, and, I — I —
why, I can't thank him now; the words don't come; the thanks
remain unshaped in my heart.”

“Excuse me,” replied Claud, “excuse me if I say, Miss
Fluella, as Mr. Phillips calls you, that you have already expressed,
and in the finest terms, far more than I am entitled to;
so let that pass, and tell us how your mishap occurred?”

“O, naturally enough, though rather stupidly,” responded
the other, regaining her ease and usually animated manner.
“You must know that I sometimes play the Indian girl, in
doing my father's trouting. And, having rowed down to the
rapids this morning for that purpose, I ran my canoe on to a

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

rock, up here at the head of the falls, and threw into an eddy
below, till I had taken a supply. But, like other folks, I must
have the one more, — a large one I had seen playing round my
hook; and, in my eagerness to take him, I did not notice that my
canoe had slipped off the rock till I found it drifting down the
current. I seized my oar, but, with the first blow in the water
it snapt in my hands. You know the rest, unless, perhaps, the
number of fish I caught,” she added, pointing to a string of fine
trout still lying safely in the bottom of her canoe.

“Brave girl!” exclaimed the hunter, going up to the boat
with Claud, to inspect the fish, which they had not before noticed.
“A good ten pounds, and fine ones, too. Claud shall
remain here while I go a piece up the lake for a deer, and follow
your example, except the race down the rapids; but that
he can't do, for I shall take our canoe with me, and make him
fish from the shore, which will be just as well. Are you agreed
to that arrangement, young man?”

This proposition being accepted, and it being also settled by
common consent that no further attempt should, at this time, be
made to ascend the remaining rapids with either of the boats
the hunter and Claud, accompanied by the light-footed Fluella,
took up her canoe and set off with it, along shore, towards a
convenient landing in the lake above, then not more than sixty
or seventy rods distant. In a short time the proposed landing
was reached, and the boat let down into the water. The
maiden, with an easy and sprightly movement, then flung herself
into her seat, and, with a paddle hastily whittled for her out
of a piece of drift-wood, by the ever ready hunter, sent her little
craft in a curving sweep into the lake; when, facing round to
her preservers, while a sweet and grateful smile broke over her
dimpling features, she bade and bowed them adieu, and went
bounding over the undulating waves towards her home, on an
island some miles distant, near the southeastern border of this
romantie sheet of water.

“Can it be,” half-soliloquized Claud, as he stood rivetting his

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

wondering gaze on the beauteous figure, which, gracefully bowing
with the lightly-dipping oar, was receding from his rapt
view, and gradually melting away in the distance; “can it be
that she is but a mere Indian girl, one of those wild, untutored
children of the forest?”

“It is even so, young man,” responded the hunter, rousing
himself from the reverie into which he also seemed to have
fallen at the departure of his fair favorite; “it is even so; but,
for all that, the very flower of all the womankind, white or red,
according to my ideas, that ever graced the borders of these
lakes.”

“But how came she by those neatly-turned English features,
and that clear, white complexion?”

“Why, her mother, who is now dead, was an uncommon
handsome woman for a squaw, and had, as I perhaps should
have qualified when I answered so about this girl, some white
blood in her veins; or rather had, as the old chief once told me,
somewhere away back among the gone-by generations, a female
ancestor, a pure white woman, who was made captive by the
Indians, and married into their tribe, and who was as handsome
as a picture. But the white blood seemed to have been pretty
much lost among the descendants, till the appearance of this
nonsuch of a girl, in whom every drop of it seemed to have again
been collected.”

“Some might, perhaps, draw different conclusions in the
case.”

“Yes, and draw them very wrongfully, too, as I have no
doubt many people do in such cases; for I have often noticed
it among families, and ascertained it as a fact, that where a
person of particular looks and character once lived, his or her
like, though not coming out visibly in any of the descendants for
a long time, is sure sooner or later to appear, and so will frequently
leap out in a child four or five generations off; a complete
copy, in looks, blood, and character, of the original (as far
as can be judged from family tradition), who may have been

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

dead an hundred years. This is my notion; and I hold that
every person is destined to be at least once reproduced among
some of his descendants. I, or the exact like of me, will
likely enough be seen in some of my blood descendants, fifty or
an hundred years hence, building dams or mills on these very
falls, or even riding in a carriage around these wild lakes, where
I have spent nearly my whole life in hunting moose, and the
other wild animals known only in the unbroken forest.”

“Your theory may be true, but it does not quite account, I
think, for the evident intelligence and culture of this remarkable
girl. To appear and converse as she does, she must have seen
considerable of good society out of the forest, and, I should
think, schools.”

“She has, both. Her father, one fall, when she was a girl of
ten or eleven, took her along with him to a city on the coast,
where he went to sell his furs and nice basket-work, and where
she, some how, excited the lively interest of a good family, and
particularly of a wealthy gentleman then living in the family.
Well, the short of the matter is, that they persuaded the chief
to leave her through the winter; and, she becoming a favorite
with them all, they instructed her, sent her to school, and
dressed her as they would an own daughter, and would only
part with her in the spring on condition of her returning in the
fall. And so it has gone on till now, she living with them winters,
and here with her father summers; for, though they would
like to take her entirely out of the woods, she would not desert
her father, who loves her as his life, and calls her the light of
his lodge, — no, not for all the gold in the cities.”

“You must then be well acquainted with this Indian family,
and can give me their history.”

“As far as is proper for me to tell, as well as anybody, perhaps.
When I was a young man, I at times used to live with
the chief, who always made me welcome to his lodge, and gave
me his confidence. He was then but little past his prime, and
one of the smartest men, every way, I ever knew. He was then

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

worth property, and lived with his first wife, this girl's mother,
who, as I told you, was very good-looking and intelligent. But
his second wife was as homely as his first was handsome. As to
Wenongonet himself, who has now got to be, though still active,
an old man, he claims to have been a direct descendant of
Paugus, — a grandson, I believe, of that noted chief, — who was
slain in Lovewell's bloody fight, and whose tribe, once known
as the Sokokis or Saco Indians, who were great fighters, it is
said, were then forever broken up, the most of them fleeing
over the British highlands and joining the St. Francis Indians
in Canada. The family of Paugus, however, with a few of the
head men, who survived the battle, concluded to remain this
side of the mountain, and try to keep up a show of the tribe on
these lakes, where they lived till Paugus' son, who on the death
of his father became their sagamore or chief, died, when they
gradually drew off into Canada, leaving Wenongonet, the last
chief's son, the only permanent Indian resident, after a while,
on these lakes. But come, young man, enough of Indian matters
for to-day: we must now be stirring, or our day's work
may come short. Help me to take my canoe up here into the
lake; and, within four hours, the time to which I will limit my
absence, we will see what can be done by each, in our different
undertakings.”

The employment of another half-hour fully sufficed to place
the canoe of the hunter in the smooth water above the rapids;
when the latter, with a cheery “heigh ho,” at each light dip of his
springy oar, struck off towards the foot of the pine-covered hills
that lift their green summits from the western shores of the
lake, leaving his young companion to proceed to his allotted
portion of the sports or labors of the day. Preparing his long
fishing-rod and tackle, according to the instructions which the
hunter had given him for adapting his mode of fishing to the
locality and season, Claud made his way along down the edge
of the stream to a designated point, a short distance above the
place where, on the occurrence of the incident before described,

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

they had ceased to ascend the rapids in their canoes. He here
found, as he had been told, below a traversing reach of bare
breakers, a large, deep eddy of gently revolving water, in the
centre of which lay tossing on the swell a broad spiral wreath
of spotless foam. The hunter, in selecting these rapids, and especially
this resting-spot of the ascending fish, as the place
where he could safely warrant the taking of the needed supply
of trout, had not spoken without knowledge; for it may well be
doubted whether there could be found, in all the regions of the
north, a reach of running water of equal length with this wild
and singularly picturesque portion of the Androscoggin river,
containing such quantities of this beautiful fish as are found
about midsummer, swarming up the rapids on their way from
the Umbagog to the upper lakes.

So, at least, Claud then found it; for, having passed to the
most outward point of rocks inclosing the eddy, he no sooner
threw in and drew his skip bait round the borders of the foamisland
just named, than a dozen large trout shot up from beneath,
and leaped splashing along the surface, in keen rivalry
for the prize of the bait. With a second throw, he securely
hooked one of a size which required all his strength to draw it,
as he at length did, flapping and floundering to a safe landing.
And for the next three hours he pursued the sport with a success
which, notwithstanding the great number that broke away
from his hook, well made good the augury of his beginning. By
that time he had caught some dozens, of sizes varying from one
to seven pounds, and enough, and more than he needed. But
still he could not forego his exciting employment, and, insensible
of the lapse of time, continued his drafts on the seemingly
inexhaustible eddy, till roused by the long, shrill halloo of
the returned hunter, summoning him to the landing above.
Throwing down his pole by the side of his proud display of fish,
he hastened up to the lake, where he found the hunter complacently
employed in removing, for lightness of carriage, the
head and offal of a noble fat buck; when the two, with mutual

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

congratulations on their success, took up the canoe, and, with a
stop only long enough to take in the trout, carried and launched
their richly-freighted craft at a convenient place in the stream
below. Seeing Claud securely seated in the bottom of the canoe,
and the freight nicely balanced, the hunter took his paddle, instead
of setting-pole, the better to restrain the speed of the boat
at the most rapid and dangerous passes, and struck out into the
current, adown which, under the quick and skilful strokes of its
experienced oarsman, it was borne with almost the swiftness of
a bird on the wing, till it reached the quiet waters of the pond;
and, this being soon passed over, they entered and descended
the next reach of rapids with equal speed and safety. All
the dangers and difficulties were now over; and, leisurely rowing
homeward, they were, by sunset, at the cottage of the
Elwoods, displaying the fruits of their enterprise, and recounting
their singular adventures to the surprised and gratified inmates.

p720-121 CHAPTER IX.

“Then came the woodman with his sturdy team
Of broad-horned oxen, to complete the toil
Which axe and fire had left him, to redeem,
For culture's hand, the cold and root-bound soil.”

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The next morning, it being the day appointed for the “logging
bee,” the Elwoods were again up betimes, to be prepared
for the reception of the expected visitants. On going out into
the yard, while yet the coming sun was only beginning to flush
the eastern horizon, Mr. Elwood perceived, early as it was,
a man, whom he presumed, from the handspike and axe on his
shoulder, to be one of the company, entering the opening and
leisurely approaching, with an occasional glance backward
along the road from the settlements below. Not recognizing
the man as an acquaintance, Elwood noted his appearance
closely as he was coming up. He was a rather young-looking
man, of a short, compactly built figure, with quick motions, and
that peculiar springy step which distinguishes men of active
temperament and hopeful, buoyant spirits; while the fox like cut
of his features, the lively gray eyes that beamed from them,
and the evidently quick coming and going thoughts that seemed
to flash from his thin-moving nostrils and play on his curling
lips, served to indicate rapid perceptions, shrewdness, and a
kind and perhaps fun-loving disposition.

“Hillo, captain, — or captain of the house, as I suppose you
must be,” he sang out cheerily, as with slackening step he approached
Elwood; “did you ever hear spoken of, a certain
rough-and-ready talking sort of a chap they call Jonas
Codman?”

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