he recovered only a brother, but also
a nephew, whom he could love and respect, and who would, in some
measure, supply the loss of his son, by transmitting his family name,
the extinction of which no man can regard with indifference.

Long was the conversation of the brothers after their children had
left them to themselves. Together they wandered over the scenes of
childhood, recalling its minutest, and, what would be to strangers,
uninteresting scenes, George Armstrong listening, with a sad pleasure,
to the details of his parents' lives after his own escape from the
Asylum, and, also, to changes in the family of his brother since their
death; while James Armstrong as eagerly drank in the particulars of
his brother George's adventures. But little respecting the latter need
be added, after what has been disclosed.

We already know, that George Armstrong married, in one of the Western
States, and commenced the life of a pioneer, and that, in a night
attack, his cabin had been burned, his wife killed, and his son
carried away by the savages. It would seem that the effect of these
misfortunes was again to disturb his reason, and that, urged by a
passion for revenge, he had made himself terrible, under the name of
Onontio (given by the natives, with what meaning is unknown,) among
the Western Indians. But, after a time, the feeling passed away, and
he became, somehow, a subject of religious impressions, which assumed
the shape of a daily expectation of the Coming of Christ, joined with
a firm belief in the doctrine of predestination. In this frame of
mind, influenced by a feeling like the instinct, perhaps, of the bird
which returns from the southern clime, whither the cold of winter has
driven it, to seek again the tree where hung the parental nest, George
Armstrong came back to the place of his birth. He was supposed to
be dead, and, even without any such prepossession, no one would have
recognized him; for, the long beard he had suffered to grow, and the
sorrow and hardship he had undergone, gave him an appearance of much
more advanced age than his elder brother, and effectually disguised
him. Why, instead of taking possession of the cabin, on Salmon Island,
and secluding himself from society, he did not make himself known to
his brother and demand his inheritance, always puzzled the gossips of
Hillsdale, and yet, it appears to us, susceptible of explanation.

When he came from the West, he felt, at first, as if the ti