, that on neither night had they
spoken to him, or given indications that they considered him a living
being. In performing their mazy dances, they had several times come
within a few feet of him, and once one of the agile creatures, running
out of the circle, cleared his head with a bound, which showed that
the impediment was observed and avoided. Determined to make himself
known to them, if words could do so, the Nanticoke, a stranger to
fear, approaching the circle of dancers, thrust himself into the midst
of them. Yet was his object unaccomplished. They danced around him,
they crossed their hands touching him, they leaped over him, in
appearance they ran against him, though he felt them not. Still none
of the circumstances produced recognition. He hallooed, apparently
they heard him not; he danced with them, they heeded not his motions.
Determined, whatever it might cost him, to make them know him, he
caught at a passing form, selecting, for the object of his embrace,
the most beautiful of all the dancers, a lovely woman, whose beauties
cannot be described. What did he embrace? A shadow! a mere phantom!
That beautiful form is a shade! He draws not to his bosom a creature
invested with the attributes of humanity, with its virtues, its
faults, its weaknesses. He feels not the soft breath of woman fanning
his cheek, nor the throb of her little heart bounding against his own.
There comes a cold, clammy air to his brow, like that of water in a
cold morning, and the pulsation of his heart is checked instead of
quickened. She is gone. He finds he has no more power to retain her in
his arms, or to awaken in her a knowledge of his existence, than he
has to arrest the march of the summer wind, or to hold conversation
with the stars of night. Another, and another, and yet another
fruitless attempt to clasp that form, for whom he begins to feel a
new, and strange, and predominating interest, convince him that they
are not of his order, but exist unapproachable by beings of clay.
Again the morning dawns, and again they fly to their damp and chill
retreat.

The Nanticoke, exhausted by long watching, and wearied out by
incessant exertion to embrace the beautiful phantom, lay down upon the
earth, and sunk into a deep sleep. Then it was that the Manitou of
Dreams came to his couch, and whispered in his ear these words:

"Nanticoke! the shadows which nightly appear to thee are the Spirits
of the Well. In this well for many hundred