nd wrong of sex for doing any valiance, long I lay by
my father's body, wringing out my wretchedness. Thirst and famine now
had flown into the opposite extreme; I seemed to loathe the thought
of water, and the smell of food would have made me sick. I opened my
father's knapsack, and a pang of new misery seized me. There lay nearly
all his rations, which he had made pretense to eat as he gave me mine
from time to time. He had starved himself; since he failed of his mark,
and learned our risk of famishing, all his own food he had kept for me,
as well as his store of water. And I had done nothing but grumble and
groan, even while consuming every thing. Compared with me, the hovering
vultures might be considered angels.

When I found all this, I was a great deal too worn out to cry or sob.
Simply to break down may be the purest mercy that can fall on truly
hopeless misery. Screams of ravenous maws and flaps of fetid wings came
close to me, and, fainting into the arms of death, I tried to save my
father's body by throwing my own over it.

CHAPTER III

A STURDY COLONIST

For the contrast betwixt that dreadful scene and the one on which my
dim eyes slowly opened, three days afterward, first I thank the Lord in
heaven, whose gracious care was over me, and after Him some very simple
members of humanity.

A bronze-colored woman, with soft, sad eyes, was looking at me
steadfastly. She had seen that, under tender care, I was just beginning
to revive, and being acquainted with many troubles, she had learned to
succor all of them. This I knew not then, but felt that kindness was
around me.

"Arauna, arauna, my shild," she said, in a strange but sweet and
soothing voice, "you are with the good man in the safe, good house. Let
old Suan give you the good food, my shild."

"Where is my father? Oh, show me my father?" I whispered faintly, as she
raised me in the bed and held a large spoon to my lips.

"You shall--you shall; it is too very much Inglese; me tell you when
have long Sunday time to think. My shild, take the good food from poor
old Suan."

She looked at me with such beseeching eyes that, even if food had been
loathsome to me, I could not have resisted her; whereas I was now in
the quick-reviving agony of starvation. The Indian woman fed me with
far greater care than I was worth, and hushed me, with some soothing
process, into another abyss of sleep.

More than a week passed by me thus, in the struggle between