ined, whatever pain it might cost, to reveal to her mother all
her feelings, and to be guided by her advice.

True hearted, guileless girl! instinctively she felt that the path of
duty leads to peace and happiness.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Oh, how this tyrant, doubt, torments my breast!
My thoughts, like birds, who're frighten'd from their nest,
Around the place where all was hush'd before,
Flutter, and hardly nestle any more.

OTWAY.

Our story now reverts to the Indians, of whom we have for so long made
little or no mention. It is in vain for us to attempt to control the
course of our tale, and to compel it, as it were, to be content with
the artificial banks of a canal, stealing insensibly on, with uniform
smoothness, to its terminus. Whatever we may do, it will assert its
liberty, and wander in its own way, foaming down rocks and rugged
precipices, like a mountain stream, at one moment, at the next,
stagnating into a pool, and afterwards gliding off in erratic
windings, roaming like Ceres, searching through the world for her lost
Proserpine. Not ours to subject the succession of events to our will,
but to narrate them with such poor skill as nature and a defective
education concede, trusting that a homely sincerity, if it cannot
wholly supply the place of art, may palliate its want.

Peena, the partridge, or Esther, as she was more commonly called by
the whites, heard, with an exquisite delight, that the little boy;
whom she had left on the steps of the house, in New York, and now
discovered to be Pownal, was the son of Holden. Nothing could have
happened more calculated to deepen the reverence she had long felt
for the Solitary, and to convince her--though no such argument was
necessary--that he was a "great medicine," or one peculiarly the
favorite, and under the guardianship, of Superior Powers. She
herself seemed controlled by the Manito that watched over Holden, and
compelled, even unknown to herself, to guard his interests. For was it
not she who had preserved the child? Was it not she who had placed
him in a situation to become a great and rich man?--for such, to her
simplicity, Pownal seemed to be--was it not she who had brought father
and son together, and revealed each to the other? As these reflections
and the like passed through her mind, a shudder of superstition
thrilled her frame, and she turned her attention to the consideration
of how she might best fulfill the designs of the Man