ction, she still continued to wander to the spots
where they had played and conversed together, under the guardianship of
the faithful Fingal; and, with no companion but the powerful and
sagacious animal, she was even permitted to ramble through the woods as
far as the Wampanoge village, and divert her sorrowful thoughts in the
society of Apannow, and her lively little son Nepea.

But after the sad day when Edith wept on the lifeless body of her
favorite Fingal, and saw him laid in the grave that was dug for him
beneath the great tulip-tree, she seemed to concentrate her affections
on the bower that Henrich had erected, and the plants that he and
Ludovico had transplanted from the forest to cover its trellised walls,
and to decorate the garden that surrounded it. Many of these were again
removed, and planted on Fingal's grave; and there--on a seat that her
brother had constructed--would Edith sit, hour after hour, either buried
in contemplations of the past and the future, or else devouring with
avidity the few books that her parents possessed, or that she could
procure from their friends and neighbors. She formed no intimacy with
any of her own young countrywomen. They were too unlike herself--they
had generally known no sorrow: or, if it had fallen on them, its
strokes had not made a like impression on their characters; and Edith
could find no consolation or pleasure in their society. So she lived
alone with her own spirit, and indulged her own high aspirations; and
none but Helen was the confidant of any of her thoughts and imaginings.
Many of them she kept within her own breast, for she felt that it would
distress her mother to know how little charm remained to her in life,
and how often she looked up into the blue depths of heaven, and wished
that she had 'the wings of a dove, and could flee away' from this cold
world, 'and be at rest' where Henrich and Ludovico dwelt.

And yet Edith was not unhappy. As she grew up, and became a more equal
and rational companion to her parents, the cares and business of life
necessarily occupied more of her time and thoughts, and gave her less
leisure for solitary meditation; and her daily increasing sense of the
duties and responsibilities of a Christian, led her to regard as
selfishness that indulgence of her own thoughts and feelings in which
she had so much delighted. She was therefore cheerful, and even gay, at
home; but she desired no pleasures beyond those that her home affo