l day, his pretty daughter kept the
house against perils without and despondency within,--the gun and the
broom alike familiar to her hand.

Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow
of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with
inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing
of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of
heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines
of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all
the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts
from birds. Nature's officers, the elements, had bestowed on her each
his appropriate gift,--the Air its crispness, the Earth its variety, the
Sun its brightness and its ruddy glow, the very Water from the well its
freshness and its fluent forms; the stars repeated their friendliness in
her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown
hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all
about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her
cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and Night her soul.

But Night, that had given her the Christian soul, true and wise,
self-reliant and aspiring, brought also the surprise and the peril that
should put it to the proof; for once, when the hunter was belated on his
path, and sudden midnight had caught him beyond the mountain, far
from the rest of his hearth and the song of his darling, came the red
Pawnees, a treacherous crew,--doubly godless because ungrateful, who had
broken the hunter's bread and slept on the hunter's blanket,--and laid
waste his hearth, and stole away his very heart. For they dragged her
many a fearful mile of darkness and distraction, through the black
woods, and grim recesses of the rocks; and there they stripped her
naked, and bound her to a stake, as the day was breaking. But the
Christian heart was within her, and the Christian soul upheld her, and
the Christian's God was by her side; and so she stood, and waited, and
was brave.

And here still she stands, as the sculptor's soul sat down before her,
in a vision of faith and tenderness, to receive her image,--stands and
waits for the pity and the help of you and me, her brothers and her
lovers. We long to rescue her and take her to our hearts; we are touched
by her predicament, as Michelet tells us the heart of the beholder is