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ad twice purchased. Notwithstanding both purchase and payment, the squatter might still continue to hold his cabin and clearing--and share with me the disputed land. Welcome should I make him, on one condition--the condition of becoming his guest--constant or occasional--in either way, so long as I might have the opportunity of enjoying the presence of his fair daughter, and to her demonstrating my heart's devotion. Some such idea, vaguely conceived, flitted across my mind, as I entered upon my second journey to Mud Creek. My ostensible object was to take formal possession of an estate, and turn out its original owner. But my heart was in no unison with such an end. It recoiled from, or rather had it forgotten, its purpose. Its throbbings were directed to a different object: guiding me on a more joyful and auspicious errand--_the errand of love_. CHAPTER TWENTY NINE. A RED-SKINNED SIBYL. Not a sound came from the forest to disturb my sweet musings. Silent was the sky of the Indian summer--soft and balm-laden its breeze. The trees stirred not; the branches seemed extended in the stillness of repose; even the leaves of the _tremuloides_, hanging on their compressed petioles, were scarcely seen to quiver. The rustling heard at intervals, was but the fluttering of bright wings amid the foliage; or the rushing of some mountebank squirrel in reckless evolution among the branches--sounds harmonising with the scene. Not till I had entered the glade was I aroused from my reverie--at first gently, by the sudden emergence from shade into light; but afterwards in a more sensible manner on sight of a human form--at a glance recognised as that of the Indian maiden. She was seated, or rather reclining, against the blanched log; her brown arm embracing an outstretched limb; half supported on one leg--the other crossed carelessly over it in an attitude of repose. Beside her on the log lay a wicker pannier, filled with odds and ends of Indian manufacture. Though I had risen close up to the girl, she vouchsafed no acknowledgment of my presence. I observed no motion--not even of the eyes; which, directed downwards, seemed fixed in steadfast gaze upon the ground. Nothing about her appeared to move--save the coruscation of metallic ornaments that glittered in the sun, as though her body were enveloped in scale-armour. Otherwise, she might have been mistaken for a statue in bronze. And one, too, of noble proport
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