and scanned its whole extent for the object of my search, but in vain. There was the cottage, in which the wheel was still humming, and the well with its young willow waving restlessly over it. The clearing was long and narrow, and widened away toward the south, where was a field of Indian corn, in which I could distinguish my friend, the lad who had given me the water, in company with a man who, I suppose, was his father, diligently engaged in hoeing the corn; and at intervals I could hear the click of their hoes against the stones. Nothing else was to be seen, nothing else to be heard. I turned and searched the bushes about me; nothing was there. I looked up into the old plane-tree above my head; the clean and handsomely divided branches, speckled with white, guided my eye far into the very last of their verdurous recesses, but no creature, not even a bird, was to be seen there.

Strange as it may seem, I found myself refreshed and cooled by this search, and relieved from the burning and suffocating heat that I felt while the eye of the savage rested upon me. My perplexity was, however, anything but lessened; and I resolved to pursue my way home with as little delay as possible, and spell out, if I could, the mystery at my leisure. Accordingly, I plunged again into the woods, and, after proceeding a little way, began to change my course, in a direction which I judged must bring me to the spot where I had rested in the Indian glade near the spring, from which I doubted not I could find my way home without difficulty. As I proceeded, the heat of the day seemed to grow more and more oppressive. There was shade about me and over my head thick shade of oak, maple,

and walnut- - but it seemed to me as if beams of the hottest midsummer sun were beating upon my back and scorching the skin of my neck. I turned my head, and there again stood the Indian, with that eternal, intolerable glare of the eyes. I stopped not, but went on with a quicker pace. My face was flushed, my brow throbbed audibly, my head ached, the veins in my hands were swollen till they looked like ropes, and the sweat dropped from my hair like rain. A fine brook crossed my way, clear as diamond, full to the very brim, and sending up a cool vapor from its surface that promised for the grateful temperature of its waters. I longed to strip off my clothes, and lay myself down in its bed at full length, and steep my burning limbs in its current. Just then I remembered the story of Tam O'Shanter pursued by witches, and saved by crossing a running stream. If there be any witchcraft in this thing, said I to myself, it will not follow me beyond this brook. I was ashamed of the thought as it crossed my mind, but I leaped the brook notwithstanding, and hurried on. Turning afterward to observe the effect of my precaution, I saw the savage standing in the midst of the very current, the bright water flowing round his copper-colored ankles. The sight was as vexatious as it was singular, and did not by any means diminish my haste. A little opening, where the trees had been cut down and the ground sown with European grasses, came in my way, and I entered it. In this spot the red and white clover grew rankly, and blossomed side by side with columbine and cranesbill, the natives of the soil flowers and verdure the more striking in their beauty for the unsightly and blackened stumps of trees standing thick among them a sweet,

still nook, a perpetual concert of humming-birds and bees, and a thousand beautiful winged insects, for which our common speech has no name, and exhaling from the herbage an almost overpowering stream of fragrance. I no longer saw my pursuer. What could this mean? Was this figure some restless shadow, that could haunt only its ancient wilderness, and was excluded from every spot reclaimed and cultivated by the white man? I took advantage of this respite to wipe my face and forehead; I unbuttoned my waistcoat, took off my cravat and put it in my pocket, threw back the collar of my coat from my shoulders, fanned myself awhile with my hat, and then went on. Soon after I again entered the wood, I perceived with surprise that my tormentor had gained upon me. He was twice as near to me as when I first saw him, and the strange light that seemed to shoot from his eyes was more intense and insufferable than ever. I was in a part of the forest which was thickly strewn with the fallen trunks of trees, wrenched up, as it seemed to me, long ago by some mighty wind. I hastened on, leaping from one to another, occasionally looking back at my pursuer. The air in my face, as I flew forward, seemed as if issuing from the mouth of a furnace. In leaping upon a spot where the earth was moist and soft, one of my shoes remained embedded fast in the soil. It is an old one, said I to myself; I shall be lighter and cooler without it. Immediately the low branch of a tree struck my hat from my head as I rushed onward. No matter, thought I, I will send a boy to look for it in the morning.

As I sprang from a rock my other shoe flew off, and dropped on the ground before me; I caught it up without stopping, and jerked it over my head with all my strength at the savage behind me. When I next looked

back, I saw that he had decked himself with my spoils. He had strung both my shoes to his necklace of bears' claws, and had crowded down my hat upon his head over that tuft of long black hair mingled with feathers, the ends of which stood out under the brim in front, forming a wild, grotesque shade to those strangely bright eyes. Still I went on, and, in springing upon a log covered with green moss, and moist and slimy with decay, my foot slipped, and I could only keep from falling by dropping the fowlingpiece I carried. I did not stop to pick it up, and the next instant it was upon the shoulder of the Indian, or demon, that chased me. I darted forward, panting, glowing, perspiring, ready to sink to the earth with heat and fatigue, until suddenly I found myself on the edge of that ridge of rocks which rose above the Indian glade, where I had thrown myself to rest under a tree in the morning, before my steps had been dogged by the savage. The whole scene lay beneath my feet the spring, the ruins of the wigwam, the tree under which I reclined. A single desperate leap took me far down into the glade below me, and a few rapid strides brought me to the very spot where I had been reposing, and where the pressure of my form still remained on the grass. A shrill, wild shout, with which the woods rang in sharp echoes, rose upon the air, and instantly I perceived that my pursuer had leaped also, and was at my side, and had seized me with a strong and sudden grip that shook every fiber of my frame. A strange darkness came over all visible objects, and I sank to the ground. An interval of insensibility followed, the duration of which I have no means of computing, and

from which I was at last aroused by noises near me, and by motions of my body produced by some impulse from without. I opened my eyes on the very spot where I remembered to have reclined in the morning. My hat was off, my hair and clothes were steeped in sweat, my fowling-piece and shoes lay within a few feet of me, but scattered in different directions. My friend, who had accompanied me at the outset of my ramble, was shaking me by the shoulder, bawling my name in my ear, and asking me if I meant to lie there all day. I sat up, and found that the shade of the tree under which I was had shifted many feet from its original place, and that I was lying exposed to the burning beams of the sun. My old acquaintance, the red earth-newt, had made great progress in the grass, having advanced at least a yard from the place where I remembered to have seen him when I was beginning to grow drowsy, before my adventure with the savage. My friend complained that he had been looking for me for more than an hour, and hallooing himself hoarse without effect, and that he was sure we should be late for dinner. I said nothing to my companion about what had happened until the next day, when I ventured to relate a part of the strange series of real or imaginary circumstances connected with my ramble. He laughed at the earnestness of my manner, and very promptly and flippantly said it was nothing but a dream. My readers may possibly be of the same opinion; and I myself, when in a philosophical mood, incline to this way of accounting for the matter. At other times, however, when I recall to mind the various images and feelings of that time, deeply and distinctly engraved on my memory, I find nothing in them which should lead me to class them with the illusions of sleep, and nothing to distinguish them from the waking experience of my life.

I

THE SEVENTH SON

BY JAMES HALL (1793-1868)

HAD a classmate at college whose name was Jeremy Geode. Circumstances threw us together at that time, and we became attached friends. We occupied the same room and the same bed, and freely communicated to each other our most secret thoughts. I am not philosopher enough to account for the principle of attraction which operated upon us; the adhesion was very strong, but the cause that produced it was as deeply hidden from my feeble powers of perception as the properties of the lodestone. I once read a very learned and unintelligible book of philosophy, from beginning to end, for the purpose of finding out why it was that two human beings should be stuck together like particles of granite: but I had my labor for my pains. The reason was inscrutable; stuck together we were, and yet never were two individuals more unlike each other. We were perfect antipodes, and our friendship a moral antithesis. My readers will enter fully into the perplexities which this subject afforded me, when I inform them that my friend was dismally ugly, while I was not only a great admirer of beauty, but in my own opinion, at least, very good-looking. He was a sloven, I was neat and dressy. He loved books, I loved men particularly those of the feminine gender. He was devoted to figures, and so was I --but then his affections settled upon the figures of arithmetic and geometry, while mine were running riot among those of the cotillion. He was studious, grave, and unsocial; and I gay, volatile, and fond of company. I could talk by the hour about anything, or about nothing; while my friend was taciturn, seldom opening his remarkably homely mouth except to utter a syllogism or demonstrate a problem. There were occasions, it is true, when his eloquence would burst forth like the eruption of a volcano. I have seen him rant like a stump orator over a geological specimen, or pour forth metaphors in all the exuberance of poetic frenzy, while commenting upon the wonders exhibited in the structure of a poor, unfortunate mosquito which had fallen into his clutches. Strange as it may seem to those who are unacquainted with the organization of such minds, he was a wit of the highest order. A sly inuendo, a sententious remark, a playful sarcasm, uttered with the most inflexible gravity, would excite in others a paroxysm of laughter, while he was apparently unconscious of any feeling akin to mirth. That he enjoyed his own exquisite vein of humor and the humor of others, I have now no doubt, for every man who possesses any strongly marked faculty of the mind experiences a high degree of pleasure in its exercise. But he passed From the volume, Legends of the West (1832), by James Hall.

for a misanthrope, an unfeeling, selfish man, who, wrapped up in the abstraction of his own mind, had no sympathies in common with his fellow-creatures; and he was willing to pass under any character which might secure him from intrusion, and leave him at liberty to pursue the leadings of his own genius. His equanimity under these surmises, and under all the crosses of life, was absolutely miraculous; the truth was, that his vigorous understanding and native good temper enabled him to look down upon the accidents that vex other men. I alone suspected that he was kind and generous, because I had seen his eye moisten and the rigid muscles of his face relax as he perused the tender epistles of a doting mother; though it was only in after years that I learned that he earned his own subsistence and that of his parent by the labors of his pen, while he pursued his college studies. I could have wept when this fact came to my knowledge, and when I recollected how I had sometimes ridiculed his parsimonious habits and his unceasing devotion to labor.

Another trait in the character of my friend shall be chiefly noticed. Although he diligently eschewed the company of women, and regarded men with careless indifference, he seemed so perfectly enamored of the society of children and other irrational animals, that I sometimes suspected him of being a believer in the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration. When fatigued with mental exertions, he would steal off to join his little playfellows on the green beyond the town, which was their place of evening resort. There he would be seen stretched upon the grass, gazing at them with an eye of interest and of complete satisfaction. The youngsters quickly struck up an acquaintance, and cleaved to him with instinctive affection. They soon learned to bring him their hats and coats to take care of when they drew them off for play; he became the umpire in their contests and the peacemaker in their disputes; and he might often be seen with the whole posse around him, the smallest hanging on his knees and his great shoulders, and the biggest forming a dense circle, with open eyes and mouths, while he related some strange legend or explained the curious phenomena of nature. These facts were not generally known in college; and it was well for him — for had the erudite and dignified Sophomores detected him in such childish pursuits my friend Jeremy Geode would undoubtedly have been put in Coventry. He had a mocking-bird, too, in a cage, a martin-box at his window, and an industrious family of silkworms in a small cabinet. A lean, hungry, ferocious-looking cat, whose love of mice or of mythology had brought her to college, who had been expelled from one room, and kicked out of another, and suffered martyrdom in so many shapes, that, but for the plurality of her lives, she would long since have ceased to exist, at last took refuge in our room. She entered with a truly feline stealth of tread, and sought concealment with the cowardice of conscious felony. But no sooner did she attract the eye of Jeremy, than a mutual attachment commenced, a single glance revealed to each a kindred spirit; in a few hours puss was running between the student's feet; before the close of the day she was reposing in his lap, and a firm friendship was cemented. Under his care she grew fat, social, and contented, and justice requires me to say that a more intelligent or better behaved cat never inhabited the walls of a learned institution.