University of Virginia Library

3. III.

At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt
of the fashionable suburb of New-Haven stood a rambling
old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle
of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town.
It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable
shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony,
to use an expressive Gallicism, “gave upon the bay.”
Long-Island Sound, the great highway from the Northern
Atlantic to New-York, weltered in alternate lead
and silver, (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate

is divine,) between the curving lip of the bay and
the interminable and sandy shore of the island some
six leagues distant; the procession of ships and steamers
stole past with an imperceptible progress; the ceaseless
bells of the college chapel came deadened through
the trees from behind, and (the day being one of golden
autumn, and myself and St. John waiting while
black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun-steeped
precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood-red maples
flushing like a Turk's banner in the light, drew
from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a holiday.
I shall have more to say anon of the foliage of an American
October, but just now, while I remember it, I wish
to record a belief of my own, that if, as philosophy
supposes, we have lived other lives—if
it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am remembering
and describing—profoundly serene, sunny
as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more
invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy;
the sort of air that the visiting angels might have
brought with them to the tent of Abraham—it is on
such days, I would record, that my own memory steps
back over the dim threshhold of life—(so it seems to
me)—and on such days only. It is worth the translation
of our youth and our household gods to a sunnier
land, if it were alone for those immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in
Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young
ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her
pupils, of whom one was a new-comer, and the object
of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the
one day of the week when morning visiters were admitted,

and I was there, in compliance with an unexpected
request from my friend, to present him to the
agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitué in
her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to
introduce to me, a week or two before, the new-comer
of whom I have spoken above, a departure from the
ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be
a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit
claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny
as deeply as I should find agreeable. The new-comer
was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name
was Nunu.

The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines
of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in
the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry
of the nation. At present the sentiment takes occasionally
a tangible shape, and the transmission of the
daughter of a Cherokee chief to New-Haven, to be educated
at the expense of the government, and of several
young men of the same high birth to different colleges,
will be recorded among the evidences in history
that we did not plough the bones of their fathers into
our fields without some feelings of compunction.—
Nunu had come to the sea-board under the charge of a
female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one
of the native schools of the West, and was destined,
though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to
her tribe when she should have mastered some of the
higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an apt
scholar, but her settled melancholy when away from
her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try the
effect of a little society upon her, and hence my privilege
to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine
of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want
of interest, and the manner of course, with which St.

John had received my animated descriptions of the
personal beauty of the Cherokee.

“I have hunted with the tribe,” was his only answer,
“and know their features.”

“But she is not like them,” I replied, with a tone of
some impatience; “she is the beau ideal of a red skin,
but it is with the softened features of an Arab or an
Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and has
no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in your
chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in her
eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose of her
attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra. I tell
you she is divine.”

St. John called to his dog, and we turned along the
green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's
house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story.