e coming man.

We do not know the name of the "hollow" through which Verty came
on the bright morning of the day following the events we have just
related. But autumn had never dowered any spot more grandly. All the
trees were bright and dewy in the sunrise--birds were singing--and the
thousand variegated colors of the fall swept on from end to end of it,
swallowing the little stream, and breaking against the sky like a gay
fringe.

Verty knew all this, and though he did not look at it, he saw it, and
his lips moved.

Cloud pricked up his ears, and the hound gazed at his master
inquiringly. But Verty was musing; his large, dreamy eyes were fixed
with unalterable attention upon vacancy, and his drooping shoulders,
whereon lay the tangled mass of his chestnut hair, swayed regularly as
he moved. It only mingled with his musings--the bright scene--and grew
a part of them; he scarcely saw it.

"Yes," he murmured, "yes, I think I am a Delaware!--a white? to dream
it! am I mad? The wild night-wind must have whispered to me while I
slept, and gone away laughing at me. I, the savage, the simple savage,
to think this was so! And yet--yes, yes--I did think so! Redbud said
it was thus--Redbud!"

And the young man for a time was silent.

"I wonder what Redbud thinks of me?" he murmured again, with his old
dreamy smile. "Can she find anything to like in me? What am I? Poor,
poor Verty--you are very weak, and the stream here is laughing at you.
You are a poor forest boy--there can be nothing in you for Redbud to
like. Oh! if she could! But we are friends, I know--about the other,
why think? what is it? Love!--what is love? It must be something
strange--or why do I feel as if to be friends was not enough? Love!"

And Verty's head drooped.

"Love, love!" he murmured. "Oh, yes! I know what it means! They laugh
at it--but they ought not to. It is heaven in the heart--sunshine in
the breast. Oh, I feel that what I mean by love is purer than the
whole wide world besides! Yes, yes--because I would die for her! I
would give my life to save her any suffering--her hand on my forehead
would be dearer and sweeter than the cool spring in the hills after a
weary, day-long hunt, when I come to it with hot cheeks and burnt-up
throat! Oh, yes! I may be an Indian, and be different--but this is all
to me--this feeling, as if I must go to her, and kneel down and tell
her that my life is gone from me when I am not near her--that I walk
and live