ding amid the sands of the East, like wrecks on a
rocky shore, to testify to the storms of ages!"

"They are gone. Time has lasted too long for them. For why? Time was
made by the Lord, and they were made by man. This very spot of reeds
and grass, on which you now sit, may once have been the garden of some
mighty king. It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.
The tree blossoms, and bears its fruit, which falls, rots, withers,
and even the seed is lost! Go, count the rings of the oak and of the
sycamore; they lie in circles, one about another, until the eye is
blinded in striving to make out their numbers; and yet a full change of
the seasons comes round while the stem is winding one of these little
lines about itself, like the buffaloe changing his coat, or the buck his
horns; and what does it all amount to? There does the noble tree fill
its place in the forest, loftier, and grander, and richer, and more
difficult to imitate, than any of your pitiful pillars, for a thousand
years, until the time which the Lord hath given it is full. Then come
the winds, that you cannot see, to rive its bark; and the waters from
the heavens, to soften its pores; and the rot, which all can feel and
none can understand, to humble its pride and bring it to the ground.
From that moment its beauty begins to perish. It lies another hundred
years, a mouldering log, and then a mound of moss and 'arth; a sad
effigy of a human grave. This is one of your genuine monuments, though
made by a very different power than such as belongs to your chiseling
masonry! and after all, the cunningest scout of the whole Dahcotah
nation might pass his life in searching for the spot where it fell, and
be no wiser when his eyes grew dim, than when they were first opened. As
if that was not enough to convince man of his ignorance; and as though
it were put there in mockery of his conceit, a pine shoots up from the
roots of the oak, just as barrenness comes after fertility, or as these
wastes have been spread, where a garden may have been created. Tell me
not of your worlds that are old! it is blasphemous to set bounds and
seasons, in this manner, to the works of the Almighty, like a woman
counting the ages of her young."

"Friend hunter, or trapper," returned the naturalist, clearing his
throat in some intellectual confusion at the vigorous attack of his
companion, "your deductions, if admitted by the world, would sadly
circumscribe the efforts of