d the yet blazing-fire that
had warned them so opportunely from its dangerous vicinity. In another
moment they had crept a second time into the forest, though in the
opposite quarter from that whence they had come; making their way through
what had once been a broad path, evidently cut by the hands of man,
through a thick cane-brake, though long disused, and now almost choked by
brambles and shrubs; and, by and by, having followed it for somewhat less
than half a mile, they found themselves on a kind of clearing, which, it
was equally manifest, had been once a cultivated field of several acres
in extent. Throughout the whole of this space, the trunks of the old
forest-trees, dimly seen in the light of a clouded sky, were yet
standing, but entirely leafless and dead, and presenting such an aspect
of desolation as is painful to the mind, even when sunshine, and the
flourishing maize at their roots, invest them with a milder and more
cheerful character. Such prospects are common enough in all new American
clearings, where the husbandman is content to deprive the trees of life,
by _girdling_, and then leave them to the assaults of the elements and
the natural course of decay; and where a thousand trunks, of the gigantic
growth of the West, are thus seen rising together in the air, naked and
hoary with age, they impress the imagination with such gloom as is
engendered by the sight of ruined colonnades.

Such was the case with the present prospect; years had passed since the
axe had sapped the strength of the mighty oaks and beeches; bough after
bough, and limb after limb, had fallen to the earth, with here and there
some huge trunk itself, overthrown by the blast, and now rotting among
weeds on the soil which it cumbered. At the present hour, the spectacle
was peculiarly mournful and dreary. The deep solitude of the spot,--the
hour itself,--the gloomy aspect of the sky veiled in clouds,--the
occasional rush of the wind sweeping like a tempest through the woods, to
be succeeded by a dead and dismal calm,--the roll of distant thunder
reverberating among-the hills,--but, more than all, the remembrance of
the tragical event that had consigned the ill-fated settlement to neglect
and desolation, gave the deepest character of gloom to the scene.

As the travellers entered upon the clearing, there occurred one of those
casualties which so often increase the awe of the looker-on, in such
places. In one of the deepest lulls and hushes