with his own reason; and he could not
reflect, without anxiety, on the unequal contest that he had so rashly
courted. Then came the glowing image of Alice; her distress; her actual
danger; and all the peril of his situation was forgotten. Cheering
David, he moved on with the light and vigorous step of youth and
enterprise.

After making nearly a semicircle around the pond, they diverged from the
water-course, and began to ascend to the level of a slight elevation in
that bottom land, over which they journeyed. Within half an hour they
gained the margin of another opening that bore all the signs of having
been also made by the beavers, and which those sagacious animals had
probably been induced, by some accident, to abandon, for the more
eligible position they now occupied. A very natural sensation caused
Duncan to hesitate a moment, unwilling to leave the cover of their bushy
path, as a man pauses to collect his energies before he essays any
hazardous experiment, in which he is secretly conscious they will all be
needed. He profited by the halt, to gather such information as might be
obtained from his short and hasty glances.

On the opposite side of the clearing, and near the point where the brook
tumbled over some rocks, from a still higher level, some fifty or sixty
lodges, rudely fabricated of logs, brush, and earth intermingled, were
to be discovered. They were arranged without any order, and seemed to be
constructed with very little attention to neatness or beauty. Indeed, so
very inferior were they in the two latter particulars to the village
Duncan had just seen, that he began to expect a second surprise, no less
astonishing than the former. This expectation was in no degree
diminished, when, by the doubtful twilight, he beheld twenty or thirty
forms rising alternately from the cover of the tall, coarse grass, in
front of the lodges, and then sinking again from the sight, as it were
to burrow in the earth. By the sudden and hasty glimpses that he caught
of these figures, they seemed more like dark glancing spectres, or some
other unearthly beings, than creatures fashioned with the ordinary and
vulgar materials of flesh and blood. A gaunt, naked form was seen, for a
single instant, tossing its arms wildly in the air, and then the spot it
had filled was vacant; the figure appearing suddenly in some other and
distant place, or being succeeded by another, possessing the same
mysterious character. David, observing