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
holyday. 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
......... “our star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar” —
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 threshold 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 newcomer, 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 newcomer
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 newcomer
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 seaboard 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.
