who lived about them in reverence,
and their words had double weight in council when important subjects
were discussed; and indeed the present head of each was often chosen
to lead them on to the almost constantly recurring battles and
bloody guerilla contests that transpired between the mountaineers
and their enemies, the Russian Cossacks.

The family of Gymroc was blessed with a fair daughter, an only
child, who, though living among a people who were so universally
endowed with loveliness in their gentler sex, was famed for her
transcendent loveliness far and near, and the youths of the
neighboring valleys and plains sighed in their hearts to think that
the fairest flower in all Circassia was but blooming to shed its
ripened fragrance and loveliness in the harem of some dark and
bearded Mahometan, to be the toy of some rich and heartless Turk.

One there was among the young mountaineers, Aphiz Adegah, whose
whole life and soul seemed bound up in the lovely Komel, as she was
called. Neither was more than eighteen; indeed Komel was not so old,
for but sixteen full summers had passed over her head. They had
grown up together from very childhood, played together, worked
together, sharing each other's burthens, and mutually aiding each
other; now quietly watching the sheep and goats upon the hillsides,
and now working side by side in the fields, content and happy, so
they were always together.

Komel was almost too beautiful. With every grace and delicacy of
outline that has, for centuries, rendered her sex so famed in her
native land, she added also a sweet, natural intelligence, which,
though all uncultivated, was yet ever beaming from her eyes, and
speaking forth from her face. Her form possessed a most captivating
voluptuous fullness, without once trespassing upon the true lines of
female delicacy. Her large and lustrous eyes were brilliant yet
plaintive, her lips red and full, and the features generally of a
delicate Grecian cast. Her hair was of that dark, glossy hue, that
defies comparison, and was heavy and luxuriant in its fullness.

Some one has said that no one can write real poetry until he has
known the sting of unhappiness; and sure it is that beauty ever
lacks that moss-rose finish that tender melancholy throws about it,
until it has known what sorrow is. Komel had been called to mourn,
and melancholy had thrown about her a gentle glow of plaintiveness,
as a grateful angel added another grace to the ro