If chance he spied the Indian lurking there:
And should they bear him prisoner from the fight,
While they are sleeping in the dead midnight,
He slips the thongs that bind him to the tree,
And leaving death with them, bounds home right happily.[4]

XXIII.
Before the mother, bursting through the door,
The redman rushes where her infants rest;
Oh God! he hurls them on the cabin floor!
While she, down kneeling, clasps them to her breast.
How he exults and revels in her woe,
And lifts the weapon, yet delays the blow:
Ha! that report! behold! he reels! he dies!
And quickly to her arms the husband--father--flies.

XXIV.
In the long winter eve, their cabin fast,
The big logs blazing in the chimney wide--
They'd hear the Indian howling, or the blast,
And deem themselves in castellated pride:
Then would the fearless forester disclose
Most strange adventures with his sylvan foes,
Of how his arts did over theirs prevail,
And how he followed far upon their bloody trail.

XXV.
And it was happiness, they said, to stand,
When summer smiled upon them in the wood,
And see their little clearing there expand,
And be the masters of the solitude.
Danger was but excitement; and when came
The tide of Emigration, life grew tame;
Then would they seek some unknown wild anew,
And soon, above the trees, the smoke was curling blue.

XXVI.
Long e'er the pale-face knew them, or their land,
Here, too, the redmen met in the stern strife
Of foe to foe and bloody hand to hand--
The mortal agony of life for life:
How fertile is this "dark and bloody ground!"
Here Death has given many a horrid wound![5]
Here was the victim tortured to the stake,
While dark Revenge stood by, his burning thirst to slake.

XXVII.
Methinks I see it all within yon dell,
Where trembles thro' the leaves the clear moonlight;
Say, Druid Oak, can'st not the story tell?
Why met they thus? and wherefore did they fight?
And wept his maiden much? and who was he,
Who thus so calmly bore his agony?
Sang he his death song well? was he a chief?
And mourned his nation long in notes of lengthened grief?

XXVIII.
Here, f