en as one who, under the
influence of incipient slumber, rejects the fantastic images that rise
successively and indistinctly to the slothful brain, until, at length,
they weaken, fade, and gradually die away, leaving nothing but a
formless and confused picture of the whole; so was it with Miss de
Haldimar. Had she been throughout alive to the keen recollections
associated with her flight, she could not have stirred a foot in
furtherance of her own safety, even if she would. The mere instinct of
self-preservation would never have won one so truly devoted to the
generous purpose of her deliverer, had not the temporary stupefaction
of her mind prevented all desire of opposition. It is true, in the
moment of her discovery of the sex of Oucanasta, she had been able to
exercise her reflecting powers; but they were only in connection with
the present, and wholly abstract and separate from the past. She had
followed her conductor almost without consciousness, and with such deep
absorption of spirit, that she neither once conjectured whither they
were going, nor what was to be the final issue of their flight. But
now, when she stood on the lake shore, suddenly awakened, as if by some
startling spell, to every harrowing recollection, and with her
attention assisted by objects long endeared, and rendered familiar to
her gaze--when she beheld the vessel that had last borne her across the
still bosom of the Huron, fleeing for ever from the fortress where her
arrival had been so joyously hailed--when she saw that fortress itself
presenting the hideous spectacle of a blackened mass of ruins fast
crumbling into nothingness--when, in short, she saw nothing but what
reminded her of the terrific past, the madness of reason returned, and
the desolation of her heart was complete. And then, again, when she
thought of her generous, her brave, her beloved, and too unfortunate
father, whom she had seen perish at her feet--when she thought of her
own gentle Clara, and the sufferings and brutalities to which, if she
yet lived, she must inevitably be exposed, and of the dreadful fate of
the garrison altogether, the most menial of whom was familiar to her
memory, brought up, as she had been, among them from her
childhood--when she dwelt on all these things, a faintness, as of
death, came over her, and she sank without life on the beach. Of what
passed afterwards she had no recollection. She neither knew how she had
got into the canoe, nor what mean