red. She stepped cautiously and
slowly over the slumbering guards, and, approaching the Mohegan with a
sharp knife, severed, without noise, the cords which confined him,
and, stealing back to the door, beckoned him to follow. He did so,
planting his foot at every step gradually on the floor from the point
to the heel, and pausing between, until he was out of the cabin. His
heart bounded within him when he found himself standing in the free
air and the white moonlight, with his limbs unbound. He beheld his old
acquaintance, the stars, as bright and twinkling as ever, and saw with
rapture the same river which rolled its dark and massy waters beside
the dwelling of his father. They took a path which led westward
through the woods, and, after following it for the distance of a
bowshot, the maiden turned aside, and took, from a thick clump of
cedars, a bow, a spear, and a well-filled quiver of arrows, which she
put into his hands. She next handed him a wolf-skin mantle, which she
motioned him to throw over his shoulder, and placed on his head a kind
of cap on which nodded a tuft of feathers, which it may be remembered
she had plucked from the wings of the eagle his sentinel had so lately
killed. They then proceeded rapidly but in silence. It was not long
before they heard the small waves of the river tapping the shore;
they descended a deep bank, and the broad water lay glittering before
them in the moonlight. A canoe--his own canoe--he knew it at a
glance--lay moored under the bank, and rocking lightly on the tide.
They entered it; the warrior took one oar, the maiden another; they
pushed off from the shore, and were speedily on their way down the
river.

They glided by the shore, past the steep bank covered with tall trees,
and past where the moonlight dimly showed, embosomed among the
mountains, a woody promontory, round which the river turned and
disappeared from view.

They then reached the eastern shore, and passed close to the mouth of
the Mattoavoan, where it quietly and sluggishly mingles with the great
river, so close that they could hear from the depth of the woods the
incessant dashing of the stream, leaping over the last of the
precipices that cross its channel. They continued to pass along under
the shore, until the roar of the Mattoavoan was lost to the ear. They
were not far from the foot of the northernmost of the mountains washed
by the Great River, when a softer and lighter rush of waters was
heard. A r