Has he not also said that he will never leave or forsake you
and his boy? Why, then, do you make your heart sad? Henrich has never
deceived us--he has never, in all the years that he has lived in our
wigwam, and shared our wanderings, said the thing that was not: and
shall we suspect him now? No, Oriana; I trust him as I would have
trusted my own Tekoa: and had my brave boy lived he could not have been
dearer to me than Henrich is. He could not have surpassed him in
hunting or in war: he could not have guided and governed my people with
more wisdom, now that I am too old and feeble to be their leader: and
he could not have watched over my declining years with more of
gentleness and love. Henrich will never desert us: no, not if we return
to the head-quarters of our tribe near Paomet,[*] as I hope to do ere I
close my eyes in death. So long as I feared my white son would leave
us, and return to his own people, I never turned my feet towards
Paomet; for he had wound himself into my heart, and had taken Tekoa's
place there: and I saw that he had wound himself into your heart too,
my child; and I knew that he was more to us than the land of our birth.
Therefore I have kept my hunters wandering from north to south, and
from east to west, and have visited the mountains, and the prairies,
and the mighty rivers, and the great lakes; and have found a home in
all. But now our Henrich is one of us, and never will forsake us for
any others. Is he not Sachem of my warriors, and do they not look to
him as their leader and their father? No; Henrich will never leave us
now!'

[Footnote: The native name for Cape Cod, near which the main body of
the Nausetts resided.]

And the old man, who had become excited during this long harangue,
smiled at his children with love and confidence, and again leaned back
and closed his eyes, relapsing into that quiet dreamy state in which
the Indians, especially the more aged among them, are so fond of
indulging.

Tisquantum was now a very old man; and the great changes and
vicissitudes of climate and mode of life, and the severe bodily
exertions in warfare and hunting, to which he had been all his life
exposed, made him appear more advanced in years than he actually was.
Since the marriage of his daughter to the white stranger--which
occurred about three years previous to the time at which our narrative
has now arrived--he had indulged himself in an almost total cessation
from business, and from eve