erce heathen, friends to-day, to-morrow deadly foes,
we kept our muskets ready and our eyes and ears open, and, what with the
danger and the novelty and the bold wild life, managed to extract some
merriment as well as profit from these visits. It was different now.

Day after day I ate my heart out in that cursed village. The feasting
and the hunting and the triumph, the wild songs and wilder dances, the
fantastic mummeries, the sudden rages, the sudden laughter, the great
fires with their rings of painted warriors, the sleepless sentinels, the
wide marshes that could not be crossed by night, the leaves that rustled
so loudly beneath the lightest footfall, the monotonous days, the
endless nights when I thought of her grief, of her peril, maybe,--it was
an evil dream, and for my own pleasure I could not wake too soon.

Should we ever wake? Should we not sink from that dream without pause
into a deeper sleep whence there would be no waking? It was a question
that I asked myself each morning, half looking to find another hollow
between the hills before the night should fall. The night fell, and
there was no change in the dream.

I will allow that the dark Emperor to whom we were so much beholden gave
us courteous keeping. The best of the hunt was ours, the noblest fish,
the most delicate roots. The skins beneath which we slept were fine and
soft; the women waited upon us, and the old men and warriors held with
us much stately converse, sitting beneath the budding trees with the
blue tobacco smoke curling above our heads. We were alive and sound
of limb, well treated and with the promise of release; we might have
waited, seeing that wait we must, in some measure of content. We did not
so. There was a horror in the air. From the marshes that were growing
green, from the sluggish river, from the rotting leaves and cold black
earth and naked forest, it rose like an exhalation. We knew not what it
was, but we breathed it in, and it went to the marrow of our bones.

Opechancanough we rarely saw, though we were bestowed so near to him
that his sentinels served for ours. Like some god, he kept within his
lodge with the winding passage, and the hanging mats between him and the
world without. At other times, issuing from that retirement, he would
stride away into the forest. Picked men went with him, and they were
gone for hours; but when they returned they bore no trophies, brute or
human. What they did we could not guess. We mig