e to make out any thing concerning their
characters, except that they were not any of those who of right were
entitled to admission into the fortress. It was a fearful moment for
Ellen. Looking around, at the juvenile and frightened flock that pressed
upon the skirts of her garments, she endeavoured to recall to her
confused faculties some one of the many tales of female heroism, with
which the history of the western frontier abounded. In one, a stockade
had been successfully defended by a single man, supported by three or
four women, for days, against the assaults of a hundred enemies. In
another, the women alone had been able to protect the children, and
the less valuable effects of their absent husbands; and a third was not
wanting, in which a solitary female had destroyed her sleeping captors
and given liberty not only to herself, but to a brood of helpless young.
This was the case most nearly assimilated to the situation in which
Ellen now found herself; and, with flushing cheeks and kindling eyes,
the girl began to consider, and to prepare her slender means of defence.

She posted the larger girls at the little levers that were to cast the
rocks on the assailants, the smaller were to be used more for show than
any positive service they could perform, while, like any other leader,
she reserved her own person, as a superintendent and encourager of the
whole. When these dispositions were made, she endeavoured to await the
issue, with an air of composure, that she intended should inspire her
assistants with the confidence necessary to ensure success.

Although Ellen was vastly their superior in that spirit which emanates
from moral qualities, she was by no means the equal of the two eldest
daughters of Esther, in the important military property of insensibility
to danger. Reared in the hardihood of a migrating life, on the skirts of
society, where they had become familiarised to the sights and dangers
of the wilderness, these girls promised fairly to become, at some future
day, no less distinguished than their mother for daring, and for that
singular mixture of good and evil, which, in a wider sphere of action,
would probably have enabled the wife of the squatter to enrol her name
among the remarkable females of her time. Esther had already, on one
occasion, made good the log tenement of Ishmael against an inroad of
savages; and on another, she had been left for dead by her enemies,
after a defence that, with a more c