ake, and then to hunt his murderer."

The sons of the squatter set about their melancholy office, in silence
and in sadness. An excavation was made in the hard earth, at a great
expense of toil and time, and the body was wrapped in such spare
vestments as could be collected among the labourers. When these
arrangements were completed, Ishmael approached the seemingly
unconscious Esther, and announced his intention to inter the dead. She
heard him, and quietly relinquished her grasp of the corpse, rising
in silence to follow it to its narrow resting place. Here she seated
herself again at the head of the grave, watching each movement of the
youths with eager and jealous eyes. When a sufficiency of earth was laid
upon the senseless clay of Asa, to protect it from injury, Enoch and
Abner entered the cavity, and trode it into a solid mass, by the weight
of their huge frames, with an appearance of a strange, not to say
savage, mixture of care and indifference. This well-known precaution
was adopted to prevent the speedy exhumation of the body by some of the
carnivorous beasts of the prairie, whose instinct was sure to guide them
to the spot. Even the rapacious birds appeared to comprehend the nature
of the ceremony, for, mysteriously apprised that the miserable victim
was now about to be abandoned by the human race, they once more began to
make their airy circuits above the place, screaming, as if to frighten
the kinsmen from their labour of caution and love.

Ishmael stood, with folded arms, steadily watching the manner in which
this necessary duty was performed, and when the whole was completed,
he lifted his cap to his sons, to thank them for their services, with a
dignity that would have become one much better nurtured. Throughout the
whole of a ceremony, which is ever solemn and admonitory, the squatter
had maintained a grave and serious deportment. His vast features were
visibly stamped with an expression of deep concern; but at no time did
they falter, until he turned his back, as he believed for ever, on the
grave of his first-born. Nature was then stirring powerfully within
him, and the muscles of his stern visage began to work perceptibly. His
children fastened their eyes on his, as if to seek a direction to the
strange emotions which were moving their own heavy natures, when the
struggle in the bosom of the squatter suddenly ceased, and, taking his
wife by the arm, he raised her to her feet as if she had been an in