University of Virginia Library

AHSAHGUNUSHK NUMAMAHTAHSENG;
Or, the Reed-shaken-by-the-mind.

INTRODUCTION.

Along the whole north shore of Lake Huron, extending
over not much less than five degrees of latitude from north to
south, and varying from forty to one hundred miles in width,
there lies a vast expanse of navigable water, known as the
Georgian bay; the shores of which to this hour are almost
untrodden, except by the moccasined foot of the red man, and
the surface of which is almost unfurrowed by the keel of modern
adventure.

Divided by a long promontory, the precipitous cape of which
has taken its name of Cabot's head from a huge projecting
bowlder on its summit, and by the extended and almost continuous
chain of the Manitoulin islands, from the main lake, the
Georgian bay, from its size, its depth, the great rivers which
it receives, and the unnumbered harbors of refuge with which
its iron-bound coasts are indented, deserves rather to be regarded
as in itself a lake, than merely as a portion of the
gigantic Huron.

Yet, in spite of its magnificent extent, the unrivalled purity
of its deep, dark blue, yet wondrously transparent waters, the
wild magnificence of its iron scenery, I know nothing so
lonely, nothing which impresses the mind of the voyager with
so utter a sense of solitariness, as a sail on its unfrequented
bosom.

For days — for days — you may steam or sail right onward,
with the mainland, or the thousand islands, ever in
view, yet not a sail, not the bark of an Indian, not the smoke
of a wigwam shall vary the desolate sublimity of the scene;
unless you leave the direct course, to visit some one of the
Indian villages or the miners' stations, which of late are beginning
to grow up along the northern shore.

Only three vessels, to this day, cross the waters of the Georgian
bay; one a small schooner employed for the supply of
the Bruce mines; the second, a clever little steamer, the Gore,
plying between Penetanguishine, whence there is an easy
portage to Toronto and the Sault St. Marie; and the third, the
Mohawk man-of-war steamer, whose summer cruising-ground
embraces all the upper lakes from the great Falls of Niagara to
the lovely rapids of the Sault St. Marie. The great line of
western travel, lying along the southern and western shores
which are visited daily, I had almost said hourly during the
summer months, by steamers of most luxurious accommodation,
and sailing craft of every rig and almost every burthen, leaves
the stormy and rock-bound expanse of the Georgian bay far
aloof; and few are the visiters who have seen its wondrous beauties,
or penetrated into the mysteries of rock, wilderness, and
river, cataract, rapid, swamp, and rice lake, which diversify
its northern shore with an endless labyrinth of most romantic
beauty.

Neither the highlands of the Hudson, nor the thousand isles
of the far-famed St. Lawrence, have to me the charm of the

wild, solitary, silent grandeur of the Huron. Waters so clear,
that you can mark each prominence or cranny of the granite
rock, number each long and sinuous blade of the watergrass,
count every fish that wags a fin, five fathoms deep, more easily
than so many inches in our eastern streams or lakelets —
shores so bold, that a man-of-war can lie broadside against the
rocks, moored to the mighty pines, whose foliage makes wild
music to the gale from which they shelter her, many and
many a yard above her topmasts. No sounds or sights of life
save the plash of the heavy sturgeon falling back on the mirrored
surface, and breaking the green-wood picture, which slept
there so calmly bright, into a thousand glancing ripples; save the
wild, tremulous note, how like the Ossianic notion of a spirit's
cry, of the great northern diver; save the circling swoops of
the snowy terns and gulls; and, now perhaps and again, at
rare intervals, the heavy shadow cast on the sunny lake from
the broad wings of the bald-headed eagle, sailing between it
and the sun, and overcoming its clear surface most like a summer
cloud.

Such, and such only, are the sounds and sights which he
will hear and see, who voyages across those lonely waters, in
these days of vaunted progress and increased civilization.

But not so it was two hundred years ago; for then those
grand, and good, and brave discoverers, those only real civilizers,
only consistent benefactors of the savage, the French
Jesuits, were in their full career of enterprise, and usefulness,
and charity. Whatever may have been the course, in the Old
World, of this great, active, energetic, self-devoting sect, one
thing at least is certain, that from the first to the last in the
New World, of North America at least, they have been signally,
confessedly, and incontrovertibly, the benefactors of
mankind.

Strange it would seem, but so it is, that from the first introduction

of catholicism by the French into the northern, and
by Lord Baltimore into the southern, regions of North America,
the very genius of that religion changed its nature.

While the various sects of the protestants were martyring
one another, and combining only to butcher and rob the red
man; while the puritans were hanging quakers, banishing
baptists, burning witches, depopulating the catholic settlements,
and barbarously misusing the mild and peaceful settlers
of Acadia, offering rewards for the scalps of heathen, and
coolly sentencing independent princes, such as the brave Canonchet,
last of the Narragansets, or the right royal Wampanoag
Philip, to cold-blooded slaughter, the Jesuits with a pure
zeal, an humble self-devotion, worthy the followers of Him
whose followers they claim to be, were incurring pains and
perils equal almost to those of the first apostles, valuing their
lives at nothing, and dying with serene and Christian fortitude,
prompted by no desire but that of winning converts to the
Christian fold, and aiming at no other object than the precept
of their order, the sublime ad majorem Dei gloriam.

The great discoverers, and first explorers, the most authentic
and trustworthy historians, of our inland waters and far western
territories, neither climate nor distance, neither peril nor
suffering, deterred the dauntless Jesuits, where there were
wonders of nature to be rescued from the gloom of the primeval
forest, or souls of mortal men to be snatched from the
more perilous darkness of heathendom.

To the honor of the Frenchmen and the Jesuit, then, be it
recorded, and I, though neither of his race nor his religion.
will never cease to insist on its remembrance, that in no single
instance, do we find him using his superior force or his superior
wisdom, otherwise than as a true friend, and to the extent
of his lights, an honest spiritual counsellor, of the North
American savage.

Unlike the proud ecclesiastics, luxurious, greedy, fierce, and
cruel, who hounded the Cortez and the Pizarros against the
softer savage of the southern hemisphere, kindling the fagot
and sanctioning the rack, and baptizing with blood and fire
only, the French Jesuit used no weapons for conversion but
purity of life, humility of bearing, faith, charity, and a zeal
unconquerable for the extension of his religion.

Never the torturers, often the tortured, of their half-barbarous
converts, men often of the highest birth; men always of
the brightest parts and profoundest learning; they took upon
themselves the cross of Christ, and exchanged the most polished
court and country of the then world, for the howling
wilderness; and that without the hope of temporal or spiritual
advancement, without the possibility of gaining wealth or
fame, at the total sacrifice of every worldly comfort, at the
almost certain risk of their lives. They lived unselfish, and
they died undaunted, ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Honor to the memory peace to the ashes, of the French
Jesuits! Their bodies have long mouldered away under the
sere leaves of the forest; the very tribes whom they taught,
and by whose hands they fell, have long since vanished from
the face of the earth; but their souls live for ever in His keeping,
who sees the motive of the heart as clearly as the deed
of the hand, and will repay a thousand-fold the good works
wrought in his name, and for his love and honor.

I have wandered among the sites of their ruined stations; I
have sat on the grassy mounds, whence they perchance preached
the word of life to their dusky converts; whereon perchance
they writhed in torment at the stake, invoking mercy from on
high with their last breath upon their ignorant destroyers.

And I know nothing more affecting, nothing that leaves a
deeper or more melancholy impress on the heart, than when,
after walking miles along some difficult Indian trace, or paddling

the birch canoe over the dim and solemn waters of some
forest-embowed river, one suddenly emerges, under the glimmering
moonlight, or the fresh, dewy dawn, into the long-deserted
clearing, once fertilized by the hands of the good churchmen;
and gazes upon the ruins of the outposts erected in the
extremest solitudes, not against earthly foes, but against the
arch-enemy of man.

There one may trace, even now, by the surrounding objects,
the routine of their innocent and blameless lives; there, was
the garden where they raised their frugal stores; even now
all wild, degenerated, and untrained, he may discover the
scions of the European fruit-trees, which they brought from
the apple-orchards of old Normandy, or the richer districts of
Touraine; here is the spring, whence they drew the water
which, it may well be, sealed the Christianity of Iroquois or
Huron neophytes, long ere the Ojibwas or Pottowatomies
brought fire and havoc from their southern hunting-grounds,
and quenched the altars with the blood of their own unresisting
ministers.

Many a legend dwells, to this day, about the places which
their deaths and their lives have alike rendered holy; and
although these are related now by the descendants of the very
tribes who slaughtered them, yet they are told with sympathy,
and oftentimes with real sorrow; for the Ojibwas now no more
sacrifice the white dog at the full of the moon, but are gathered
for the most part under the same mild Christian rule professed
by the froquois, whom two centuries ago they slaughtered as
idolaters.

None of these struck me as more sadly solemn, than this of
Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, or the Reed-shake-by-the-wind,
an Ojibwa girl, who, in those dark and bloody days,
brought, like another Helen, havoc and desolation whither she
had laid up her fatal, though not guilty love.

1. CHAPTER I.
THE MAIDEN.

It was already daylight, though the sun had not yet risen
above the tops of the forest-trees, which formed the visible
horizon; and from the aspect of the skies overhead, and the
soft, dewy coolness of the fragrant morning air, it promised to
be as beautiful a summer day as ever gladdened the face of
earth. There were but two, or three, small, fleecy specks of
cloud, suspended motionless near the zenith, visible in the
dark azure of the skies; and these were changing their hues
momently, as long lustrous rays came stealing up from the
eastward, harbingers of the sun's advent. A moment ago, they
were plain, sad-colored, gray patches on the blue ground-work;
gradually a dull purple glazed them over; that brightened into
rose-color; into rich carmine; and now they are glittering like
coals of fire, or flecks of molten gold, mirrored as clearly in
the still, narrow, brimful river, as they glow aloft in the summer
sky.

The thin, light mist, which crept up awhile since from the
surface of the translucent stream, has melted into air; and the

evergreens on the farther shore, huge hemlocks and heaven-reaching
pines, which grow down to the very water's edge, are
reflected so wondrously distinct, dark feathery plumage, arrowy
limbs, and white, weather-bleached centennial trunks,
that it were a very true eye which should define at once where
is the meeting of the reality and of the shadow. Ever and
anon a plump of duck and mallard come sweeping over head,
above the tops of the highest trees, the strident whistle of their
wings first attracting the eye to their quick, glancing flight,
and are scarce seen before they have darted out of sight beyond
the wooded point that bounds the next reach of the gentle
river. Once and again a heavy shadow flits over the smooth
expanse, the image as it seems of a gigantic pair of wings,
overshadowing half the width of the sunlighted channel. It
ceases suddenly, for the wings which projected it are folded,
and there on the naked crest of a huge cypress, poising himself
on the very pinnacle, sits the bald-headed eagle, watching
to see the parent duck lead forth her fledgling brood from the
cool covert of the sheltering lily-leaves, which overspread the
shoals, and give the wary water-birds a sure asylum. There
flits, along the pebbly margins, the noisy yellow-leg, the golden
plover, or the small-spotted sand-piper, each in pursuit of some
small worm or insect, its peculiar prey. There the harsh-screaming
kingfisher circles above the small fry, as they dimple
the tranquil surface, hunting fry smaller yet, and yet more
powerless. There again, motionless as the gray trunk behind
him, which in hue he most resembles, patient and watchful,
stands the great blue heron; and now he cocks his bright eye,
and with an arrowy motion darts forward his long neck and
javelin bill, transfixing with a pitiless stroke the monster bullfrog,
chief basso of his aquatic orchestra, just as he has himself
sucked in a beautiful golden and blue tibellula, as he hung
poised with rapid wing over an open lotus flower. Here, in
the shadow of the bank, where the water sleeps so clearly in
its brown, transparent reflections, mark, where, itself a shadow,
lies in expectant ambush the lithe body of the great northern
pickerel. There, he has struck at a passing shiner, and ere
the bright, silvery streak, that marked his rapid transit through
the water, has subsided, a heavier plunge is heard; for the
felon otter, watching from his hole under the tortuous alder-roots,
has espied the motion, and pounced, tyrant-like, on the
spoiled and the spoiler simultaneously.

So it is ever, in the wilderness as in the world, the strong
prey still upon the weak, and the weak on the weaker. All
life is one long flight from those to be avoided, one long pursuit
of those to be made captive. From the man, half divine,
to the reptile, less than the brute, there is no rest, no respite
— to take or be taken, to slay or to be slaughtered, such seem
to be the conditions on which the boon of life is held; nor is
the crowded haunt, the boasted mart of civilized life in great
cities, in this respect endowed with one immunity beyond the
lonely forest, or the howling desert.

That is a wild and lonely spot even now, and few and rare
are the settlements around it, either of the white man or the
half-civilized Ojibwa or Pottawatomie, but at the time at which
I write, there was no spot more savage, nor farther removed,
as it would seem, from every human influence, than the wild
woods, the rocky shores, and the still waters, which surrounded
the embouchure of what is now known as the river Wye
into the eastern end of the great Georgian bay.

The eye of the white man, even now, as he paddles across
the inner cove into which the deep, clear, narrow river opens,
fails to detect the smallest opening in the dense tree-tops of the
forest through which the brimful river finds its outlet, nor does
the bosom of the bay itself indicate, in the least degree, that
large mass of extraneous waters which here should swell its

volume, for it is shoal to the last degree, and overgrown with
a luxuriant vegetation of wild rice and reeds, through which
steal deviously a hundred tortuous and unsuspected channels,
through which only can the ponderous dug-out of the Canadian
Frenchman, or the light birch canoe of the native, find its
way into the entrance of the river.

The keener glance of an Indian, however apt to see things
with a sort of reasoning and inquiring gaze, deductive rather
than intuitive, would not be long in discovering that there ran
through those woods, seemingly so uninterrupted and unbroken,
a division line of some kind, regular though circuitous, nor in
suspecting that division line to be water; for whereas the
northern shore of the stream consists of low, damp, swampy
land, for a mile or two up the course of the river, covered with
a growth of tamarack, hemlock, and cedar, that to the south is
higher, bolder, drier, and is overspread by a finer forest of oak,
maple, birch, and poplar, with here and there the arrowy cone
of a gigantic white-pine, piercing the clouds a hundred feet
above the summits of its deciduous brethren.

To the ordinary eyes of the traveller or searcher of the picturesque,
signs like these have no meaning; but to the half-wild
forester or to the aboriginal man of the woods, they speak
volumes, and thence it is that to find any retreat so sure as to
baffle the instinct and blind the eyes of an Indian warrior on
the war-path, is one of the things — the few things on earth —
which may be set down, as the rule, to be impossible.

Nor had it escaped the penetration of the natives, that there
was more than ordinary facility in supporting their family relations
to be found in the neighborhood of the embouchure of
the beautiful Wye; for even at that early day, when the Iroquois
or Huron tribe were the sole possessors of the northern
shores of the great lakes, and when their villages and wigwams,
even upon their shores and water-courses, were few

and far between, it would seem that they had established some
settlement in that vicinity, tempted, it may be, by the abundance
of fish which swam those limpid waters, and of fowl
which fed almost unmolested among the wild-rice lakes into
which its upward course expanded.

At the point of view whence we first looked on the tranquil
river, with its lazy eddies and many-colored, beautiful reflections,
the southern shore jutted forward in a wide, semi-circular
bend, above and below which the dense evergreens, which
were the only indications of the northern shore, seeming to
swim on the bosom of the slow-flowing stream, swept forward
in their turn for a hundred yards or so, when the southern
bank again advanced, and suffering a double reach to be seen,
resembling in shape an inverted letter S, cut off all farther
view in either direction so completely, that had it not been for
the quiet and sleepy swirls of the downward current, and the
narrowness and regularity of the channel as compared to its
width, the river might have been easily mistaken for an inland
pool or lakelet.

On both sides of the water many trees had fallen into the
stream, and lay some up, some down, some partially across
the current, and these of such giant bulk and colossal height,
that had two chanced to lie directly opposite, their branches
would have mingled, and they would actually have bridged the
stream; nay, they might well, as I have often seen in that region,
when backed by deposite after deposite of drift-wood, floating
trees, reeds, rice, and river trash, have formed a raft, and
becoming gradually covered with decomposed vegetable matter,
and overgrown with parasitic plants and shrubs, have assumed
the semblance of firm soil, with the slow waters soaking
constantly, although unseen, below them, on their way to
swell the everlasting chorus of Niagara, and sweep triumphant

into the huge Atlantic, through that incomparable artery of
North America, the grand estuary of the St. Lawrence.

In this instance, however, perhaps by the constancy and
strength of the slow current, perhaps by human agency, for a
keen eye might detect the marks of the axe on some of the
massive bolls, the course of the river had been kept clear, and
though a canoe, either ascending or descending, must have
run a zigzag or circuitons course, in order to escape interruption
from the snags and sawyers, as they would be termed on
the southern waters, these in no case interlapped or lay within
forty or fifty feet distance of each other.

One of these trees, a vast white-oak, completely barked, and
bleached by the suns and snows, of fierce summers, burning
with almost tropic heat, and of winters, second to Zembla's or
Spitzbergen's only, had fallen from the extremity of the forward
bend of the southern shore, and lay somewhat down
stream, with its huge twisted roots standing erect and grisly, a
huge matted cheval-de-frize at the water's brink, and its great
gnarled and knotted branches partly imbedded in the mud,
partly overhanging the shallow which itself had created with
a canopy of moss and river-weeds, and all the trash accumulated
from a hundred floods and freshets.

Immediately below this, and so well concealed as to be invisible
to a casual observer, lay moored a birch-canoe of the
elegant form and delicate structure of the vessels of the aborigines,
and in it, busily employed even at that early hour in ensnaring
the finny denizens of the waters, sat a girl of some sixteen
or seventeen years, whom it required no second glance to
know for a child of the wilderness.

It is well known to those who have been in the habit of observing
the North American tribes in their natural state, removed
from the contamination to which they now seem almost
inevitably subject on the slightest contact with the whites, that,

despite the detractions of color and of an uncouth and uncomely
costume, there is often, not only a rare beauty, but a rare
fascination about the younger Indian females, although it may
not at the same time be denied, that were a painter in search
of a model, wherefrom to design with the most vraisemblance
the likeness of his majesty of the infernal regions, he could not
do better than to select an old squaw, of it matters not what
tribe, and his type of the hideous, the repulsive, and the horrible,
must needs be perfect.

The girl in question was slender, delicate, and elastic as a
reed swaying in the currents of a gentle breeze, and what is
unusual among the aborigines, the females of whom are inclined
to be squat and dwarfish, was considerably above the
ordinary stature even of white girls, while all the outlines of
her graceful yet voluptuous figure, displayed a perfect unison
of all the lithe and fragile symmetry of girlish years with the
mature developments of perfect womanhood.

Her brow and face were dark, but not much darker than I
have seen in the liquid-eyed damas of Venice, or the stately
Spanish donnas, and the rich blood crimsoned her full, pouting
lips, and flushed, peach-like, through the golden hue of her
cheeks, with as warm a tide as ever burned in the impassioned
cheeks of an Anglo-Norman beauty.

Her long, straight hair, not curling in the least, nor waving,
nor yet in the slightest degree hard or wiry, fell down behind
her small ears, being braided in front in two broad bands over
the temples, and confined by a fillet or coronal of blue and
white wampum, stitched upon a thong of deer-skin, in loose,
heavy, soft, flowing masses, such as we see in some of the
portraits of Velasquez and other Spanish masters. It was of
the deepest and most perfect blackness, black as ebony or as
night, without the slightest indication of that purplish metallic
lustre which generally plays over what is not unfitly called

raven hair in women of white blood, and more especially in
those of Irish race. Her eyes had the long, almond-shaped
orbits, and long-fringed lashes, which are deemed the rarest
charm of Italian beauty, and the large, soft pupils of the deepest,
clearest hazel, swam in a field of nacry bluish lustre,
which could be compared to nothing but the finest mother-of-pearl.

Her cheeks were flushed, at the moment when we look upon,
and her bright lips disparted with a gay smile, as she pulled in,
each after each, the glittering rock-bass, resplendent in their
golden armor, and watched these trophies of her prowess flapping
in the bottom of her canoe, till the gay sheen of their
scaly coats faded into the dull, blank hues of death. And as
those bright lips fell asunder in her mood of gentle merriment,
they displayed a set of teeth so brilliant, so delicately pure
and transparent in their undefiled enamel, that the most gorgeous
belle of courts and cities would have given the best
jewels she possessed in exchange for those gems of nature's
giving.

Her features, if they had not the regular and perfect symmetry,
the complete oval contour, and the short-arched,
wreathed upper lip of the Greek profile, nor yet the highborn,
glorious dignity of the superb Norman type, had yet a
harmony and unison entirely their own, a soft, tranquil, half-unconscious
majesty of stillness — something that leads you to
revert your thoughts to older worlds, or at least ages more remote,
when this earth was haply peopled by tribes less far removed
from the awful serenity of the immortals, such as sits to
this hour wonderfully enthroned on the calm brow and solemn,
tranquil beauty of the Egyptian sphynx.

Yet in this solemn fixedness of feature, this serene seriousness
of outline, there was nothing lewd or unwomanly; for in
so much as the outlines were statuesque and grave, the eyes

wildly serious, was the expression at times arch and almost
jocund, and the smile of the wreathed and dimpled lips all that
could be desired of winning, feminine, and tender.

It is remarkable, too, that although habituated more or less,
as all Indian females must necessarily be, to labors of a harder
and more abject nature than are attributed even to the poorest
and rudest American females of the white race, her hands
were as delicate and small, with slight, round, tapering fingers,
and long, oval nails, as those of any princess of unmixed Norman
race. Her moccasined feet, too, were delicately and
proportionately small, not “cribbed, cabined, and confined” —
like those of many of our modern damsels, who, in this, appear
to imitate the high castes of the Chinese — till she could neither
stand nor go, but betokening at once delicacy of structure and
fitness for the purposes to which they were created by that
Providence which assuredly never made aught except unto its
end.

Her dress was peculiar, for it indicated that, even in that
remote angle of the northern wilderness, thousands of miles
aloof from the small and recent seaboard settlements of the
whites, white luxuries were attainable for the gratification of
female vanity. The tiara of wampum about her head was not
the shell-manufactured wampum of the natives, but of fine blue
and white Parisian bead-work. Her principal garment was a
short petticoat, or tunic, not unlike that of the huntress Diana,
leaving the right breast exposed, and barely reaching to the
knee, of bright azure broadcloth, with a shoulder belt, girdle,
and fringe of bead-work. Her lower limbs were protected by
leggings of dressed deer-skin, as finely wrought as the most
costly texture of the Flemish or English looms, and her feet
covered by moccasins, elaborately embroidered with dyed
horse-hair, which must evidently have been brought a long
distance from the eastward, since the gigantic animal which

furnishes it so rarely found to the southwestward of the great
Canadian Ottawa, that it may be held to be unknown in those
regions.

Such was Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, or the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind,
the fatal heroine of a disastrous legend;
the fairest daughter of Chingwauk, the White Pine, the great
chief of the Ojibwas, cast by singular fortunes, and strange
ends, into a region many hundred leagues to the northwest of
the hunting-grounds of her tribesmen.

2. CHAPTER II.
THE JESUIT.

The morning wore on calmly, brightly, and the sun, whose
long, upward rays had been for above an hour streaming toward
the zenith, above the waving tree-tops, now raised the
upper limb of his bright disk above the rich green foliage, and
poured a flood of golden lustre directly downward into the
woodland channel of the stream, and lighted its translucent
waters down to its depths of gravelly sand, and long river-weeds
fantastically curling in the gentle current. Up to this
time the maiden had sat nearly motionless in her light bark
canoe, scarcely stirring a limb, unless to draw in another and
another of her scaly captives, to renew her bait upon the
barbed steel hook — fresh evidence, by the way, of acquaintance
with the whites — and to cast out her line again into the
little eddy among the branches of the submerged trees in which
the fish appeared to rejoice especially.

Now, however, the sun shooting his beams downward, the
fish began to show themselves indisposed to bite so freely as

before, and very soon refused altogether to take the deceptive
lure, whether that the increase of light enabled them the better
to descry the shining artifice, or that the movements of the
waving shadows on the surface, whenever the fair angler
moved her hand, betrayed her whereabouts, and scared them
from the tempting morsel.

The girl, seeing that for the present there was no more
sport to be had, was already busied in taking apart her light
tackle, winding up her line on a delicately-wrought wooden
reel, and securing her priceless hook; and that task ended, had
already lifted her paddle from the bottom of the canoe in order
to alter her position, when almost simultaneously two widely
different, and, in that deep solitude, most unaccustomed sounds
disturbed the silence of the forest.

The first of these, in point of time, was the near report of
one of the lighter firearms of that day, such as were used in
the most civilized countries of Europe in the chase, and known
as carabines, or birding-pieces, and that the weapon had not
been discharged in vain, was proved by the plunge of a beautiful
summer duck, the handsomest of all the aquatic fowls,
from its perch on the projecting branch of a tall white-oak, into
the water beneath, on the surface of which it struggled impotently
for a moment or two, and then lay motionless and lifeless,
dying the slow ripples with a large patch of dark gore
from its bill, gasping now no longer.

The other sound was the deep, melancholy, silver tone of a
large bell floating down the light air, and down the channel of
the river, from a short distance toward the uplands — a bell
so singularly soft and sweet, so serenely musical and melodious,
that its cadences would have been remarked for their
wild, sonorous swell, and long-drawn fall, even in populous
cities, where all the arts are called into play, to minister not to
the necessaries only, but to the luxuries of life. In that wild

region, therefore, untrodden as one would have been prompt
to believe by any steps save those of the prowling wild beast
or the heathen and untutored savage, how singularly exquisite
seemed that slow and solemn harmony — that harmony peculiarly
the utterance of civilization, of humanity, of the innocent
and pure religion of the white man — he and he only can
judge aright, who, after wandering, after sojourning, far aloof
from the haunts of men, comes suddenly upon the traces of the
ploughshare and the axe, and pausing on the verge of some
small forest-clearing, listens, astonished half, and all enraptured,
to the familiar music, long unheard of, the old villagebells.

There is no sound on earth by which the human soul is rapt
so suddenly away from the present scene, from the present
train of thoughts, yea, from its very self, and all the strongest
of its secret aspirations, to the long past, the long-forgotten, as
the music of a distant bell heard in the wilderness. Oftentimes,
when I, wandering as I have imagined very far from
the nearest settlement among the gigantic pines and venerable
silence of the western Canadian forest, have been surprised
from myself, and charmed away to scenes far beyond the wild-rolling
Atlantic, to the green hills and gentle pastures of my
childhood's home, even by the wild and inharmonious clank
of a cow-bell, gathering I know not what of romance, and even
melody from the accompanying scenery and circumstances,
and wafting back the willing mind from savage solitude to old
civilization.

At the first sound, the long, re-echoing gun-shot, the girl
started, and after gazing earnestly, and with something of
anxiety in her eye toward the direction whence it came,
dropped the blade of her paddle noiselessly into the water,
and by a dexterous turn of the wrist, sent the head of the canoe
gliding swift and easy as a bird through the air into the little

eddy among the boughs of the fallen tree. Another and another
sweep of the light paddle, delivered all so dexterously
that not a plash could be detected as the blade entered or left
the water, forced it out clear into the glassy current above the
obstacle which seemed to bar its way, so that before five seconds
had elapsed from the occurrence of the alarm, if such it
were to be considered, the light vessel had shot with its fair
freight, six times its own length up the stream, and was glancing
over the creeping eddies at a safe distance from the bank,
like a creature endowed with volition and swift self-motion.

At the next instant the deep tone of the bell swelled upon
her ear — again — again — again — clearly the Christian's summons
to the worship of his God.

And yet who would have deemed that in that lonely and remote
corner of the wilderness, at that far-distant period, when
the very discovery of the New World, as men called it, was
but recent, and the most satisfactory attempts at its colonization
as yet but an experiment, who would have deemed it possible
that the God of nature should have been worshipped otherwise
than by the free and natural influences of the outward
world, by the grateful choirs of the rejoicing songsters of the
woodland, by the rich incense of the flowers ascending toward
heaven on the wings of the morning dew, by the instinctive,
vague, and untutored emotions which dwell even in the breast
of the wild native of the wilderness?

Who should have reared a house to the King, Creator,
Savior of the universe, a house raised with hands in the howling
wilderness, or hung aloft that silver-tongued appellant,
summoning all those who are heavy-laden to cast down their
burthens at the foot of that cross by which alone they should
find penitence, and peace, and pardon?

By whom could it, indeed, have been raised, by whom
sanctified, by whom daily administered among toils, and woes,

and perils, such as scarce any of the sons of men, since the
first martyrs of the earliest Christian era, have encountered,
save by the members of that wonderful, that self-denying order,
the policy of which, sacrificing all individuality, all personal
independence, all power, all pleasure, all ambition of the single
man, had exalted the society of Jesus into a unity so complete,
so unassailable, and so puissant, that kings and pontiffs equally
submitted to its dictation, equally shrank from disputing its
gigantic dominion, or holding out against its masterly organization.

The word Jesuit has been used too often in our protestant
language to signify the very embodiment and personification
of bigotry, cruelty, artifice, deception, all, in short, that is
known as priestcraft, and that of the most odious and intolerant
description, until men have forgotten how much of good
mingled with evil there has existed from the beginning in the
history of Jesuitism, and how much the civilized world, and
the world of North America more particularly, is indebted to
these enthusiastic missionaries, these self-denying teachers of
the savage, these undaunted explorers of the wilderness.

“When the Jesuits,” says Macaulay, an authority not to be
doubted or disputed, when he appears as the eulogist either
of the church of England or the church of Rome, to both of
which he bears the genuine hatred of the radical dissenter,
“came to the rescue of the papacy, they found it in extreme
peril; but from that time the tide of battle turned. Protestantism,
which had during a whole generation carried all before it,
was stopped in its progress and rapidly beaten back from the
foot of the Alps to the shores of the Baltic. Before the order
had existed a hundred years, it had filled the whole world with
memorials of great things done and suffered for the faith. No
religious community could produce a list of men so variously
distinguished; none had extended its operations over so vast

a space; yet in none had there ever been such perfect unity
of feeling and action. There was no region of the globe, no
walk of speculative or active life in which jesuits were not to
be found. They guided the councils of kings. They deciphered
Latin inscriptions. They observed the motion of Jupiter's
satellites. They published whole libraries, controversy,
casuistry, history, treatises on optics, alcaic odes, editions of
the fathers, madrigals, catechisms, lampoons. The liberal
education of youth passed almost entirely into their hands, and
was conducted by them with conspicuous ability. They appear
to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual
culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation.
Enmity itself was compelled to own that in the art of
managing and forming the tender mind they had no equals.
Meanwhile they assiduously and successfully cultivated the
eloquence of the pulpit. With still greater assiduity and still
greater success, they applied themselves to the ministry of the
confessional. Throughout catholic Europe the secrets of every
government, and of almost every family of note, were in their
keeping. They glided from one protestant country to another
under innumerable disguises, as gay cavaliers, as simple rustics,
as puritan preachers. They wandered to countries which
neither mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had ever impelled
any stranger to explore. They were to be found in the
garb of mandarins superintending the observatory at Pekin.
They were to be found, spade in hand, teaching the rudiments
of agriculture to the savages of Paraguay. Yet, whatever
might be their residence, whatever might be their employment,
their spirit was the same, entire devotion to the common cause,
implicit obedience to the central authority.

“None of them had chosen his dwelling-place, or his avocation
for himself. Whether the Jesuit should live under the
arctic circle, or under the equator, whether he should pass his

life in arranging gems or callating manuscripts in the Vatican,
or in persuading naked barbarians in the southern hemisphere,
not to eat one another, were matters which he left with profound
submission to the decision of others. If he was wanted
at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If he was
wanted at Bagdad, he was toiling through the desert with the
next caravan. If his ministry was needed in some country
where his life was more insecure than that of the wolf, where
it was a crime to harbor him, where the heads and quarters of
his brethren fixed in the public places, showed him what he
had to expect, he went without remonstrance or hesitation to
his doom. Nor is this heroic spirit yet extinct. When in
our time, a new and terrible pestilence passed round the globe,
when in some great cities fear had dissolved all the ties which
held society together, when the secular clergy had deserted
their flocks, when medical succor was not to be purchased
with gold, when the strongest natural affections had yielded to
the love of life, even then the Jesuit was found by the pallet,
which bishop and curate, physician and nurse, father and mother
had deserted, bending over infected lips to catch the faint
accents of confession, and holding up to the last before the expiring
penitent, the image of the inspiring Redeemer.”

Admirable indeed were the exertions, the virtues, and the
sufferings of many, very many of these great and good men,
and if an over-enthusiasm for the good of their own order,
and for what they honestly believed to be the greater glory of
God, did at times in the Old World — as most assuredly it did
— lead them into tortuous policy, entangle them in the sophistical
casuistries of cabinets, and the perilous intrigues of courts,
if it did lead them too often to regard the expedient rather than
the good, and to permit and sanction of the doing of evil that
haply good might come of it, no such stigma rests upon their
memories in this hemisphere, aloof from court intrigues and

cabinet ambition. Here they were the civilizers only, the discoverers,
the colonists, the fertilizers of the boundless waste —
the friends, the teachers, the Christianizers, and, alas! but too
often the martyrs of the stern and savage red man.

The falls of the farthest western rivers, from Niagara to the
head-waters of the Mississippi and the foaming rapids of the
Sault St. Marie, the forest and the prairie, yea! the ice-bound
piunacles of the Rocky Mountains, were familiar to their wandering
footsteps; and before commerce or agriculture had
begun to hold dominion along the shores of the Atlantic, they
were felling the trees of the wilderness far to the northward
of the great lakes, choosing their stations with rare sagacity
— for there be now but few of them which are not the sites of
great and prosperous cities — and sowing in the breasts of
their Indian neophytes that good seed of faith, which should
lead by grace of the Most High unto eternal life.

They it was, then, who had built their fort, not so much
against human foes, as against the arch-enemy of man, upon
the northern bank of the gentle Wye, who had gathered about
the palisades of their Mission a small but faithful congregation
of the Iroquois or Hurons of the Lakes, and passed their lives
in innocence and peace “in that vast contiguity of shade,”
wresting by degrees orchards, and gardens, and green fields,
from the dominion of the forest; rescuing by degrees, from the
mists and thick darkness of ignorance and belief, the souls of
their dark-skinned brethren.

Their bell it was which now resounded so sadly, solemnly
sweet through the dim aisles of the forest, and over the surface
of the long-resounding waters — truly their silver bell —
its cadences are familiar to my ears, for it has survived those
who brought it hither to proclaim the glad tidings of the Gospel,
it has survived their very destroyers, and now, when the
sons of a different race hold the soil which whilom they cultivated,

when a different language is spoken in their abiding-places,
it still hangs aloft above a Christian place of worship,
though not of their faith who then woke its mellow cadences,
still summons those who believe to the altar of the same God,
one and eternal, and the same for ever, whom the French
Jesuit adored when its first appeal awakened the forest echoes.

As the girl caught the pleasant sounds of the church-bell, a
well-pleased smile lighted up her gentle features, and the uneasy
expression passed away from her, as the shadow of a
cloud is chased from a landscape by the sunny gleam, as she
made her light bark literally almost fly under the measured
strokes of her fairy paddle. She had already doubled the first
bend of the river, and, keeping well in toward the bank by
which she had been fishing, had interposed the wooded point
between herself and any curious eyes, which might be watching
her from below, when a tall young Indian, clad in hunting-shirt,
leggins, and moccasins of dressed deer-skin, and carrying
a long gun in his hand, made his appearance on the same side
of the stream, some ten or twelve yards at most below the
place where the maiden was fishing, when the shot was fired,
and applied himself at once to the recovery of the game he
had killed. This did not occupy him many seconds, as the
current had set the dead bird in shore, and his quick eye detected
it in an instant, as it lay among the outer twigs of a redalder
bush which overhung the stream. As he picked it up,
however, he did not fail to observe that a ripple different in its
character from the regular run of the waters, broke on the
sand-bank at his feet, and turning his glance instinctively up
stream, although it was already fast subsiding into its wonted
stillness, he was not long in satisfying himself that a canoe
had passed up the Wye, and that within a few minutes.

Bounding forward, almost with the speed of a hunted deer,
he gained the point in a moment, and running out upon the

slippery trunk of the fallen oak-tree, by the side of which the
girl's canoe had been made fast, he caught a glimpse of her as
she emerged from the cover of the foliage, and glided steadily
upward across the next reach of the river.

“The Reed-shaken-by-the-wind,” he muttered to himself,
half thoughtfully, while a bright and pleasurable expression
crossed his features, and then tossing up his arm, he uttered a
long whoop to attract her notice, and as she turned her head
to the perhaps unwelcome sound, beckoned her to return and
take him on board.

But the girl, uttering a low cry in return, as soft and harmonious
as his was dissonant and savage, shook her head half-coquettishly,
half-resolutely, and pointing ahead with her paddle
to the quarter whence the chime of the bell now came
faster and more frequent, urged her light vessel ahead with
renewed exertion, and in less than a minute shot round the
turn of the verdurous banks and was lost to his view.

The Indian, who was evidently a chief, from the excellent
condition of his garments and accoutrements, as well as from
his richly-ornamented weapons, was clearly disconcerted; a
gloom fell over his dusky features, and he frowned deeply.
Had he been a white man, he would probably have given vent
to his disappointment in an oath, but it is remarkable that blasphemy
against the Author of his existence is peculiar to the
cultivated and Christian white man, there being no oath or imprecation
to be found in the vocabulary of any Indian tribe,
even of those who pay respect and sacrifice, for the averting
of his wrath, to the Spirit of Evil. He restrained himself for
a moment or two, and stood apparently in thought. “Good!”
he said at length, speaking in his own tongue. “Girl gone
to French fathers. Very much love hear French fathers.
Love too much, maybe. Bald-Eagle go too. Hear what say
— see what do — then know what think, too.” And attaching

the summer-duck to a bunch of several other water-fowl, which
he had slung from his waist-belt, he set off through the open
forest on the upland at the long, loping-trot for which the Indians
are so famous, and which enables them to get over the
ground so rapidly, when on their hunts or on the war-path.

Meanwhile, Ahsahgunushk had kept on her way paddling
swiftly and silently, until she had rounded two more points of
the shore, and had come into view of the Jesuit settlement and
its clearings, lying fair to the long slant beams of the morning
sun, sparkling with the dew-drops of the past night, as they
hung diamond-like on the rustling leaves of the tall maize, or
gemmed the tedded grass of the luxuriant meadows.

The little opening in the forest which had been reclaimed
by the patient industry of the fathers from the solitude and
wildness of the woods, contained about a hundred acres of upland,
on both sides of the river, bounded on the lower side by
the skirts of the primeval woodland, and extending upward to
the edge of a natural wet savanna, which soon degenerated
into rice swamp, through many a mile of which the river
wound its devious way from the distant highlands. It was a
tranquil and a beautiful scene, and one by no means destitute
of refined ornament and the decorations of civilized life. The
buildings of the Mission lay, as it has been stated, on the north
shore of the river, just where a large brook, after running for
some hundred yards directly parallel to the river, turned at
right angles to its former course, and discharges a strong and
rapid stream rushing impetuously through a deep ravine which
forms two sides of a parallelogram. Of this accidental formation
of the soil, the Jesuits, who possessed no slight degree
of knowledge in both military and civil engineering, had taken
advantage for the erection of their post, a bank having been
thrown up along the inner line of this natural foss, with a
strong though irregularly built stone tower in the angle. From

the upper end of the longer limb of the ravine a wide ditch,
with a high interior bank, ran parallel to the outlet of the brook
with a circular bastion or redoubt at the upper angle, where it
again turned westerly until it terminated in a third redoubt at
the junction of the brook with the river, the whole forming a
large, oblong enclosure, with a length of about three hundred
yards to the river face, and a depth of about one third that distance,
the banks all round being garnished by a massive row
of cedar palisades of fifteen feet in height, well braced together,
and looped for musketry, besides being defended at the
top by a strong cheval-de-frize, manufactured in the forge
which the energetic priests had established and maintained
within their guarded precincts.

Each of the redoubts was armed with two small brass swivel-guns,
of the kind at that time known as “grasshoppers,”
something similar to what are now used in India under the
name of wall-pieces, capable of carrying balls only of a pound
or two calibre, but still useful for the defence of slight, irregular
works against tumultuary force, such as Indians, inasmuch as
they could sweep all the curtains with a hail of musket-bullets,
which the red warriors would be most unapt to endure.

Within this rude and rustic fortification, for the cedar-posts,
or trunks of which it was manufactured, were in their natural
rough condition all gnarled and knotted, overgrown with moss,
and in part overrun with ivy and various creepers, were the
buildings of the Mission which consisted of an interior parallelogram,
made of square logs, dove-tailed one into the other,
to the height of two stories, with no windows or apertures of
any kind to the exterior, except one large, two-leaved gate,
giving access to the court within, which opened directly opposite
to the entrance in face of the palisades, under a great
tower, fashioned like a modern block-house, with the upper

floors overhanging substructure and surmounted by the belfry,
whence pealed that sonorous and widely-venerated bell.

The buildings contained a chapel and library, occupying the
whole front of the square opening to the right and left of the
entrance archway, which was protected by strong double-doors
of hewn timber. On the opposite side was the refectory on
the ground-floor, and the dormitory of the father above, while
the two ends of the court were occupied by kitchens and
workshops for the carpenter, the smith, the cooper, with stithy,
and turning-lathe, and tool-chests, and all appliances for useful
labor. Store-houses, and a dormitory for the lay brothers were
above these, and in the centre of the parellelogram was a small
armory, well stocked with the firearms of the day, whether
for hunting or defence—swords, pikes, and some few pieces
of defensive armor not as yet entirely disused, as morions, or
sallets, or gorgets, for the protection of the head and neck.

For it must not be supposed that the Jesuits were of that
drone-like breed of monks who vegetated in the convents of
Italy, or the hill-monasteries of Syria and the Holy Land.
Not they—these were practical, shrewd, able-bodied men,
men of science, men of energy, men of the world—men forbidden
by the rules of the order from no work of industry, of
energy, or of skill, which might tend to the advancement of
science, to the advancement of human happiness, above all to
the advancement of their order. They were the men neither
to be devoured unresisting by the wild beasts of the forest, nor
to be tortured passively by its yet wilder human denizens—
they were navigators, hunters, agriculturists, fishers, antiquarians,
naturalists; they were the tamers of the forest no less
than the teachers of the Indian—and not a few of them had
been soldiers already, and had served with the carnal arm in
the fierce religious wars of Spain and France and the Low
Countries, nor would be apt to withdraw their hands now from

the sword's hilt, should it be necessary to do battle for the protection
of their own lives, the safety of the order, and the defence
of the settlement they had planted for the reclamation
of the heathen, the salvation of souls, and the greater glory
of God.

Without the palisades, however, though all within was strong
and stern, and guarded with powerful mastiffs, chained to their
kennels near the entrance, and a stout lay-brother at all times
on duty as porter, nor ever without arms in reach, there was
much ornament and graceful decoration. On the lower side
of the fort, as it is still termed, for the outlines of the banks
and fosses are still plainly discernible, as well as the ruins of
the casemated stone tower, which was not improbably applied
to more homely purposes in the preservation of their roots and
vegetables from the severe frosts of the Canadian winter, the
undergrowth of the forest grew up close to the farther edge of
the ravine, for although in the first instance a wise precaution
had led the Jesuits to fell the timber, so as to form an open
glacis for some fifty yards beyond their palisades, long security
had in some sort begotten over-confidence, and the brushwood
had been suffered to encroach on that side of the clearing,
so that it was now covered with a dense and tangled
thicket.

In front, however, between the stockade and the river, and
around the upper end of the station extending back so far as to
the brook, was a large and beautifully-kept garden, with espaliers
thickly framed with foreign fruit-trees, and bowery walks
overshadowed by trellices covered with both native and imported
vines, and amid the deep beds of pot-herbs, salads, and
cresses, and leguminous plants, and scarlet French beans and
lentils, was many a plat of flowers, some redeemed from their
wild state by sedulous cultivation, some doubly cherished because
brought from the far and happy France, filling the air

with the rich musky odor of the roses of Provence, and greeting
the eye with the gracious show of the fair lilies, the chosen
flower of France.

Above the garden again was a large orchard, of peach, plum,
apple, and pear, which though not large trees as yet, nor having
in truth had time to become so, were thrifty and in good condition,
and many of them were so heavily laden with fruit, that
there could be no doubt it would be necessary to prop them
up in order to sustain their full weight when in the maturity
of autumn. Rich maize-fields encircled the young orchard,
twinkling in the sunshine and rustling in the breeze, with a
belt of rich emerald verdure, and again beyond these, interspersed
with a few patches of rye, wheat, and barley, the level
green meadows pastured by a small flock of sheep, and two or
three little hardy Norman cows, stretched away to the eastward,
till they were lost to view amid the rank luxuriance of
the rich marshes.

A straight walk led down through the garden from the gate
of the mission to the bank of the river, where a small wharf
or jetty had been erected, at which lay a schooner-rigged pinnace
of some sixteen or eighteen tons, a couple of long, sharp,
clinker-built rowing boats, like those used by smugglers in the
British channel, two or three yawls and fishing-boats, of various
kinds and dimensions, and a whole fleet of birch-canoes
lying balanced like water-birds on the clear surface. A little
shed on the margin of the stream was filled with oars, masts,
sails, and paddles, and all the means and appliances for boating,
fishing, or fowling, as very much of the subsistence both
of the fathers and their Iroquois neophytes depended on one or
other of these pursuits, for such they are even to this day,
rather than sports in that wild region.

On the farther bank of the river the cleared land was of
about the same extent, and with the same general character

of civilization, except that there were neither gardens nor
orchards, while the maize fields were more extensive, and
were intermixed with considerable tracts planted with esculent
roots, and many of the coarser European vegetables. Almost
exactly opposite to the fort, on a grassy table-land, below the
cultivated grounds, and surrounded on two sides by the skirts
of the forest, stood a small Huron village of about sixty lodges,
built of stronger materials, and with a greater view to permanence
than is usual with the dwellings of the aborigines. A
council-lodge stood nearly in the centre of the area, around
which the wigwams were irregularly scattered, but what
seemed a strange and most unlooked-for appendage to a council-lodge
of the rude Iroquois, a large crucifix of wood had
been reared in front of it, supporting an effigy of the dying
Redeemer, rudely but boldly sculptured in the soft wood, demonstrating
that the labors of the good fathers had not been vain,
and that the village was inhabited by neophytes who had inclined
a willing ear to the admonitions of the order, and had
turned their hearts to that meek and gentle faith, through which
alone cometh salvation.

Dogs, children of all ages, canoes, racks for drying fish, and
rude implements of husbandry and agriculture, lay scattered
about, and among these, interspersed with European tools and
instruments of steel and iron, lay many hammers, chisels,
hatchets, and the like, shaped by untutored Indian skill out of
the pure native copper of the lakes, which the aborigines had
long worked and known how to temper to a degree of hardness
unattainable by our utmost science, although, on the introduction
of iron tools and weapons by the French, they speedily
abandoned their use, deserted and blocked up the mouths of
their mines, and concealed them with such care from the
whites, that, although their existence was well ascertained,
their whereabout was never known to the Jesuits, and that it

is in comparatively latter days only that they have been re-discovered.

Such was the scene that had filled so many times before the
eyes of Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, that it failed now to
awaken any expression in her handsome features, and she exhibited
only an anxiety to reach the dock of the mission, before
the bell had ceased to ring, which it might now be speedily
expected to do, since it had already changed its sweet and solemn
cadence for the quick tremulous chime which precedes
the cessation of the call to worship.

At the jetty, speaking gravely to some of the lay brethren,
and to two or three scattered Indians, who as they left him
hurried up toward the Mission, stood a tall young man, exhibiting
nothing peculiarly clerical in his appearance, for he was
not tonsured, but wore his long black hair falling in straight
uucurled masses down either cheek; nor in his garb, except
that he wore a large, showy crucifix about his neck, for he
was clad in leather hunting-shirt, pantaloons, and moccasins,
with a wood-knife in his belt, and a strong staff with an iron
pike at the extremity in his hand. He was finely proportioned
and of a graceful figure, but so slender and even thin, that he
gave you the idea of having been emaciated by sickness or
privation, and his singularly handsome intellectual features,
with their dark olive hue, were so unnaturally sharpened, that
they naturally conveyed the same impression.

A bright light flashed in the soft hazel eyes of the Reed-shaken-by-the
wind, and a strange, fitful color flushed her dark
cheeks as her eye fell on the commanding figure of the ascetic;
and as her canoe came to land, she flung the deer-skin painter
over one of the posts of the little dock, and hurried up toward
him, with an air singularly blended of consciousness with
timidity.

3. CHAPTER III.
THE PROPOSAL.

Raoul de Rohan, better known by his ecclesiastical title
of Father Borromee, who was now attached to a mission of
French origin, and supported entirely by the French government,
which had seriously turned its attention to the colonization
of the Canadas, and the northeastern provinces of the
North American continent, was by birth a Frenchman, of the
very highest birth and station. His family had given more
than one marshal to their country, and the exploits of the name
of De Rohan had been recounted in every clime whose air
had fluttered the glorious oriflamme, whose sun had shone
upon the glittering panoply and brandished arms of the patrician
leaders and daring hosts of France. Cast early upon the
world, a noble and rich orphan, Raoul had followed the standard
of his country for the aggrandizement of her ambitious
monarch, had won great fame in the field while yet a mere
boy, and had been permitted to buckle on the golden spurs of
knighthood, long ere he had attained to the years of manhood.
Nay! it was openly asserted that he might have aspired to the
baton of a marechal of France; but suddenly, none knew
wherefore, he relinquished the dazzling career on which he
had entered with such early promise, betook himself to Rome,
where he joined the company of Jesus, and, before many years
had passed, enjoyed as high a reputation for energy, zeal,
learning, piety, eloquence, and absolute devotion to the interests
of his order, as he had formerly achieved for conduct and
valor in the tented field.

By the director-general of the order, he had been several
times intrusted with missions of the highest importance in almost
every quarter of the world, from Pekin to Paraguay, and
from the shores of the Red sea and the summits of Lebanon
and Sinai, to the turbid flood of the Mississippi and the cold
crags of the Rocky Mountains. Nor had he once failed in
eliciting the highest praise from his superiors, until he reached
that pitch of eminence, most rare for his years, that whenever
duties were canvassed of more than ordinary peril, and requiring
more than ordinary powers and ability for their accomplishment,
the father Borromeè was ever the first named, both
as the fittest person to be employed and the most eager and
earnest aspirant of the order.

Melancholy, grave, and taciturn, nay, almost cold in his
natural deportment, few suspected, even those who knew him
best, that the calm, tranquil exterior, the impassive lineaments,
the voice imperturbable in its clear, slow, modulated flow,
were but the draperies and disguise of a nature fiery and fierce
as the noonday sun of the equator; and that under the cover
of that iron self-control which seemed immovable as the earth-fast
hills, there raged a very furnace of burning and blighting
passions, a temper prone as the flint to give sparks of fire in
return for stroke of steel, as prone as the snow-wreath to melt
into pitiful tears at touch of human sympathy or sorrow.
Strange stories had been rife when he resigned the sword and
spurs for the crucifix and cowl, of frustrated affections, and the
course of true love as usual run astray, of crimes and agonies,
raptures and madness, but like vain rumors they died away,
and none who looked now on the taciturn, emaciated priest,
wasted with penance and maceration, watching and fasting,
and every form of self-denial, could have deemed it possible
that the very spirit of the gladiator, the very passions of the
restless, reckless, roving soldier dwelt beneath the hair-shirt,

which he wore ever beneath the buckskin which was more
fitting wear for the western wilderness than the surge cassock
of the monk.

Yet, in despite his ascetism, the father Borromeè was a
favorite among the brothers of his order, the chosen counsellor
of his superior, and beloved by the Indians of the Mission with
a love approaching almost to idolatry, which he was wont at
times to censure in the frank and artless neophytes, as being
greater in degree and more intense in its character than it became
mortal creatures to bestow one upon the other. The
secret of this lay perhaps in the fact that stern and rigid toward
himself, he was indulgent, liberal, and unexacting toward
others; that grave and austere to himself when alone, he was
genial, bland, and warm-hearted, toward others, and that his
tact and tenderness in managing those full-grown children of
nature's own framing, the red Indians, he was celebrated above
the celebrated, and was everywhere, so far as his eloquence
or his report had penetrated, the counsellor, the friend, and almost
the father of those who loved to call themselves his red
children.

It was toward this stately and dignified personage that the
“Reed-shaken-by-the-wind” turned her footsteps, carrying in
her hand the string of rock-bass which she had taken, and
with a very singular expression in her large liquid eye, half-bashful
and shy, yet half-alluring and attractive, and with something
in her whole gait, air, and demeanor, that implied an
eager desire to attract notice, mingled with a timidity more
than mere girlish bashfulness, which seemed as if it must have
its own peculiar meaning. Her eyes were downcast as she
approached the priest, yet she shot long, furtive glances from
beneath the deep-fringed lashes which were pencilled in strong
relief against the glowing hues of her rich cheeks, for she
blushed deeply, almost painfully as she became conscious that

his clear, cold, penetrating eye was fixed on her as she approached
with intense serutiny. As she drew nearer to him
yet, she faltered more and more, and with her head bowed
meekly, and her left arm pressed across her gently budding
bosom, she knelt silently at his feet, laying her little offering
of fish before him, and seeming to implore his blessing, although
her lips could syllable no sounds to ask it.

The cold face of the impassive churchman relaxed not in
the least, perhaps, if anything, it waxed graver, harder, and
more solemn, and that deep, keen, gray eye pierced deeper,
deeper, as if it would penetrate her soul, that she fancied she
could almost feel its penetration like that of a two-edged instrument
of steel.

At length, however, as if with something of an effort, he
signed the cross over her brow, and then extending both hands
with the palms deflected over her head — “Bless thee,” he
said, in tones full of calm, devotional affection, “bless thee, my
daughter, and may He bless thee, whose blessing only avails
anything, and keep thee to eternal life.”

She rose slowly and gazed wistfully and gratefully into his
eyes, and then turned as if to go toward the chapel, whither
many of the Indians, as well as all the brothers and lay brothers
of the company were flocking in from the fields, when his
steady and harmonious voice arrested her.

“Ashahgunushk, whither goest thou?”

“To church, father,” she replied, speaking in singularly
pure French, with an accent hardly at all foreign or provincial.
“I am almost too late, but I knew not the hour until I heard
the bell, where I was fishing.”

“Art thou prepared, Roseau tremblante?” he asked again,
addressing her now by the French translation of her Indian
name; “art thou prepared to worship the most high God, in
penitence of heart and sincerity of spirit?”

“Father!” the girl replied, with a tremulous hesitation that
was singularly touching, but she said no more.

“Art thou prepared, I say, daughter, to bow the knee of thy
heart before the Lord of all mercies, and ask of him that forgiveness
which he alone can grant, and then only to the true
penitent?”

“Father, I am prepared — I know my own unworthiness.”

“When didst thou confess thyself, my daughter?”

“On Easter-Sunday, father,” she replied, again hesitating,
and casting down her eyes to the ground, and her cheeks now
steeped with burning blushes.

“Not since so long — and wherefore, Ahsahgunushk?
Thou wert wont to be truly penitent, daughter, even for small
offendings. Wherefore not since so long?”

“Father,” returned the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind. “Father,
it is that — that — I dare not.”

“Dare not! — you dare not confess?” he replied severely, in
his slowest and most solemn tones. “You dare not to confess,
Ahsahgunushk? — and how then shall you dare to die? and
how know that this very day, nay, that this very hour, He shall
not require your soul of you, to whom you dare not confess?
Of what so great sins are you guilty, that you should not repent
them, and confess, and be forgiven?”

“Oh, very, very guilty! Pardon me, father, pardon me!”
and she again knelt at his feet, and strove to clasp his knees,
burying her head in her lap as she did so, and bursting into a
flood of tears of humiliation, and an agony of self-abasement.

“It is not for me to pardon — only to pronounce the pardon
of Him who is in all, and through all, and over all, unto those
who repent them truly of their sins past, and intend steadfastly
to lead a new life.” And he drew back from her half-extended
arms as he spoke, adding — “Touch me not, daughter, for I
fear that thou art corrupt of heart, and that thy touch is of pollution.

But, hear me, go thy way into the church, and pray
for strength and succor from above. To-morrow morning,
which is Sunday, I shall be in the chair, and see thou come to
confessional, so shall I set thee penance for thine ill-doings,
if that they deserve it, and grant thee absolution of thy sins.”

“Oh, no, no, father! I can not,” she exclaimed amid an
agony of passionate weeping. Oh, no, no, no — I can not — I
can not.”

“Canst not confess, Ahsahgunushk — and wherefore —
wherefore — what crime couldst thou have done so terrible
that thou must needs despair?”

“Not that,” she faltered — “not that, father. I could — I
could perhaps confess but — not — not — in short, not to thee!”

“Not to me!” exclaimed the father Borromeè starting backward,
“and wherefore, I prithee, not to me? Why it is to me
that you came for admission to the fold of Christ the Savior!
It is I, who prepared you for your first sacrament, I who have
absolved you ever of your failings and errors, for hitherto your
sins have been but venial — and, even now, I trust that I shall
not lack the power to console you, and absolve you of this
your evil doing, be it what it may. Only come, come, I command
you, as you would save your soul alive, come to the confessional
to-morrow morning.”

And with the words he turned on his heel, without uttering
another word, and strode away silent and austere, to robe himself
in clerical vestments, put on above his forest costume, in
order to minister at the altar, the only altar to the true God in
thousand miles of breadth of wilderness, and lake and river.

The maiden followed him silently, with her large dark eyes
swimming in tears, yet fixed upon his commanding form, like
pure stars shining through the mists which may dim, but can
not obliterate their spiritual lustre. Passing beneath the arch
iuto the corridor of the mission-house, she turned short to the

right, and stood within the precincts of the chapel, a large rustic
building erected, it is true, from the perishable materials of
the forest only, but in the pointed Gothic style, the groined
arches being composed of the gnarled and fantastic knees of
gigantic oaks, and the columns of knotted shafts of heaven-aspiring
pines, all wearing the natural colors of the timber,
unpainted and aspiring to no decoration beyond the ruggedly-symmetrical
forms in which they had been arranged by the
master-hand of one who had not studied architecture for mean
end or little purpose. At the entrance stood a vessel containing
holy water, and at the farther end was an altar, with an
ascent of six broad steps, and a wooden railing, above which
was seen the scanty sacramental plate, duly arranged on the
board, and several candelabra furnished with candles manufactured
from the wax of the wild-bee by the hands of the fathers
themselves within the walls of the mission. Not far from the
altar stood a pulpit of form so graceful, that it atoned for the
simplicity and rudeness of the material, and above the sacramental-table
towered on a huge cross of ebony, the semblance
of Him crucified, exquisitely carved in ivory; this sacred
effigy, together with the sacramental-plate, being the only
articles of foreign character discoverable in that foreign sanctuary.

Within its humble walls were associated all the members
of the order, and most of the Christian Indians, for it was the
usage of the fathers to commence every day with a brief service,
at which they required the presence of all the neophytes,
unless for especial reasons shown wherefore they should absent
themselves, and morning after morning, whether the burning
sun of July was scourging the tree-tops with his intolerable
lustre, or the deep snows of December lay spotless over miles
and miles of untrodden wilderness, the sounds of their matinbell,
hailing the advent of the happy dawn, and summoning the

artless worshippers to greet the Giver of all good with their
unpretending orisons. Nearly a hundred Indians were collected,
mostly old men, or girls and women, for the chiefs were
principally absent fishing for the great salmon of the lakes, and
the delicious white-fish, which were beginning to run in toward
the shores and shallows about the river mouths, and on
which the community in a great degree depended for their
winter subsistence. And orderly they sat and attentive, with
their dark serious eyes fixed wistfully on the face of the ministering
priests, accurately performing all the signs and ceremonials
of the ritual, crossing themselves and making the accustomed
genuflexions, and even uplifting their sweet and
silvery voices to join the chanted hymns and litanies, but of
course unable to comprehend a word of the services, which
were couched in an unknown tongue. The brief services
were, however, soon completed, and then the Father Borromeè,
ascending the pulpit, preached a short, lucid, and eloquent,
because fervent, direct, and clearly comprehensible sermon, in
the French language, to as attentive an audience as ever listened
to the words of holy writ from the mouth of mortal man.
He had taken as his text the words — “Come unto me all ye
that are heavy laden,” and his discourse was not an apology
for the use of the confessional, but a direct and forcible argument
in behalf of its necessity, ending with a striking and
almost sublime peroration, inviting, commanding, imploring all
those who would not slight and impiously reject the gift inestimable
gift of the dying Redeemer, even the gift of his own
divine life, draw near and confess, meekly kneeling upon their
knees, the sins of which, being human, they must necessarily
have committed, and to receive that absolution and forgiveness
which should fit them for eternal life.

Many an eye of those who listened to his eager and solicitous
appeal, for he appeared this morning singularly and as

it were personally earnest in enforcing his doctrines, was wet
with tears of genuine and sincere penitence for slight and
venial offences, and many a heart was moved to an earnest
renunciation of some familiar and favorite sin, for his words
were of that order that pierce the sick heart through the ear,
and speak with abiding force to all those who listen in humility,
eager to be convinced, through faith, unto salvation. But
there was one soul through the very depths of which every
word, every accent of that deep voice thrilled with a strange
and supernatural power; there was one eye, which, though
downcast and humbly fixed on vacancy, discerned every change
of the dark expressive features of the speaker, read the most
secret thoughts of his heart, felt that his deep, calm, penetrating
eye was fixed upon herself, and knew that however he
might be in appearance preaching to each and all of his little
congregation, every word was, indeed, addressed to herself,
every exhortation pointed at her, every thought suggested by
the conversation which they had held together but a little while
before — that was the girl Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng,
or the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind; and, indeed, like a very reed
she was shaken and distracted by the contending winds of
passion and devotion, of human wishes and holier aspirations.
“And can it be,” she thought within herself, “can it be that
he believes me so sinful, or am I, indeed, sinful, and is this
hopeless love, this settled, this devoted, this unselfish, fixed
affection, which never may be gratified; is this — is this, indeed,
a sin. Oh! that he knew, oh! that he knew, once for
all, that which is in this poor, faint heart of mine. For he is
good, and he would pity — he is wise, and he could guide;
and yet, and yet, how can I ever tell him — he can be so stern
to the obstinately sinful; and oh! but this sad love of mine is
very, very obstinate. How shall I ever tell him. “O mon
bon Dieu,” she cried aloud, as her thoughts, her fears, her imagination,
overpowered her; “O mon bon Dieu, aidez moi, car
je suis fuible, car je suis faible, car je tombe. O mon bon
Dieu, aidez moi, sauvez moi, pardonnez moi, miserable que je
suis!”

And the deep voice of the preacher took up her words as
she uttered them, seemingly unconscious that he had been interrupted,
thus bringing it for the first time to her mind that
she had cried out in the bitterness of her soul before the whole
congregation. “O bon Dieu! aidez nous, sauvez nous, pardonnez
nous, miserables que nous sommes, pecheurs, et indignes,
pardonnez nous; au nom du fils bien cheri, au nom du Saint-Esprit,
pardonnez, pardonnez, et sauvez — Amen! Amen!”

The words sunk deep into the wounded spirit of the girl,
and she believed for a moment that he penetrated her secret,
that he had fathomed the abysses of her obstinate and rebellious
heart, that he understood, pitied, prayed for her. Yet
never was she under the influence of a more unfounded fancy.
She had been rather a favorite of the Jesuit from the first, her
singular innocence and artlessness, the confidence with which
she had accepted his ministry, her simple and ingenuous faith,
and her remarkable readiness in acquiring the tongues of Europe,
which she had literally caught on the wing as they fell
from his fluent lips, had all attracted his attention and pleased
his imagination. She was his first convert, too, of that wild
tribe, so that he regarded her not only as an innocent and spotless
lamb rescued by his agency from the fangs of the devouring
wolf, but felt toward her something of the feeling which
dwells in the breast of a young mother toward a first-born
child.

Her rare beauty, too, though he was ignorant of its effect,
and would have shrunk back in horror could he have even
dreamed that the short-lived comeliness of flesh and blood
could influence his imagination, or win anything of his favor,

had probably not failed of its wonted attraction; and he confessed
even to himself that her sweet, low voice — the voices
of most Indian women, while young, are liquid and melodious,
but Ahsahgunushk's was so even to the wonder of the tribe —
found a responsive chord in his memory, or his fancy — he
would not admit even to himself that he had a heart — and
transported him to days long past, and scenes long unvisited,
but never to be forgotten.

If, however, the maiden erred in supposing that the causes
of her agitation, her absenting herself from the confessional,
her tears and self-reproaches were understood or suspected
by the father, she deceived herself yet more blindly when she
supposed that they had escaped the eyes of another. And
yet, when she arose from her knees at the conclusion of the
service, and found the keen, hawk-like glance of the Bald-Eagle
riveted with a meaning expression, half fierce, half fond,
yet either way, most repulsive, upon her shrinking form and
conscious features, she shuddered with a sort of half-prophetic
terror, and endeavored so to mingle herself with the other girls,
as to escape his notice.

If such, however, was her intention, it was frustrated, for as
she passed out of the gateway into the garden, a hand was
laid firmly, though not forcibly, upon her shoulder, and as she
started, and instinctively endeavored to free herself from the
grasp, the deep voice of the Indian, suppressed into its gentlest
tones, fell upon her ear ungraciously, and conveying nothing
either of confidence or of gratification on its tones.

“Be not frightened, Ahsahgunushk,” it said, “it is only I —
the Bald-Eagle of the Iroquois. I, who am your friend, and
the son of your father” — for, when captured, almost in her infancy,
from her own tribe, the Ojibwas, whom the whites called
Chippewas, she had been adopted by the great war-chief
of the Hurons, the War-Eagle, and had been brought up in

his wigwam as if she had been his daughter. “Come this
way,” he continued, waving his hand through the garden toward
the ravine and the woodland beyond it. “Come this
way, the Bald-Eagle would hold council with the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind.”

The girl trembled with ill-repressed aversion, and could
scarcely conceal her reluctance, although the Bald-Eagle was
both a well-formed and handsome Indian, whom any girl of
his tribe would have gladly enlisted among her admirers, and,
besides being the oldest son of the great chief and the succes-sor
to all his hereditary honors, was celebrated as the best
hunter and the bravest warrior of the [roquois of the lakes. He
did not, therefore, suspect for a moment that she could have
any repugnance to himself unless as connected with a preference
for another, and who that other was, he doubted if he did
not actually suspect. He was a man, however, of violent passions
and strong impulses, of an energetic will, and of a resolute,
unbending, and self-confident spirit. No one, therefore,
could be less likely to yield his pretensions to an imaginary
rival, or to shrink from the fanciful fear of meeting a repulse,
from making his wishes known to one over whom in the vain
audacity of his soul he conceived that his slightest wish ought
to have the influence of a law.

The girl, however, who was only annoyed, and not in the
least degree intimidated or overawed by one who could have
no influence over such a mind as hers, except that which may
be produced by the reality of physical superiority and the reputation
of manly courage over the less active spirit of the woman,
replied simply, “No, not that way. Let us take the
canoe, we will speak in it, on the river, where no one shall
hear what the Bald-Eagle wishes with his sister.”

“Not sister!” replied the chief, abruptly. “Do n't say that.
Not sister, I tell you. Ojibwa girl not sister to the Bald-Eagle

of the Iroquois. Sister — no, never. Wife sometime,
maybe.”

In the meantime, the girl had stepped down the bank, and
taken her place in the stern of the canoe, paddle in hand, and,
although she distinctly heard the last words which the youthful
warrior uttered, she affected not to perceive or comprehend
his meaning, but motioned him to take his seat facing her,
near the head of the slight bark, and sent it out into the middle
of the stream by a dexterous sweep of her paddle.

Then turning her face full upon him, and fixing him with
her full, bright, calm eyes, she asked him, in a steady voice,
in the Iroquois tongue,

“What does the Bald-Eagle wish?”

“The Bald-Eagle,” replied the young man, “is alone. His
lodge is empty. The Bald-Eagle has plenty of venison, plenty
fish, plenty duck — the Bald-Eagle is a great hunter, his arrow
never misses, his spear is death to the salmon — he has plenty
of skins, plenty cloth of the pale faces, plenty of wampum —
but he has got no squaw. His lodge is very empty, his heart
is very lonely — the Bald-Eagle wishes a wife.”

“Why not take wife, then?” said the girl, blushing at his
words, yet still affecting to misunderstand him. “Plenty
young Huron girl wish husband, plenty good girl, plenty handsome.
Why not take Iroquois girl for wife, Bald-Eagle?”

“Iroquois girl not good, not handsome;” answered the warrior.
“Ojibwa girl better. Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng,
she wife good for Bald-Eagle.”

“Not wife, only sister,” she replied, quietly. “Grow up
with young chief in same lodge, they papoose together, children
together. Brother, sister — not good marry sister. No,
no, not wife, Bald-Eagle, only sister.”

Fire flashed from the dark eyes of the Iroquois chief, as he
heard her reply, and he clinched his hands vehemently; for

he fully understood her meaning, and almost as fully comprehended
the inutility of contending against her gentle but assured
will, or endeavoring to alter her purpose. But knowing
that violence and rage would be only worse than useless, he
made a great effort, and subduing his fierce temper, replied in
a voice as quiet as that in which he had commenced his wooing.

“Not true,” he said. “One father, one mother make brother,
make sister. My father, War-Eagle, of the Iroquois, my
mother, `Mist-of-the-Lakes.' Ahsahgunushk's father, Chingwauk,
of the Ojibwas, he call White-Pine, great chief, too;
mother, Ojibwa squaw, maybe. Not brother, not sister at all.
I say not sister. The Bald-Eagle's lodge waits for the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind.
The Bald-Eagle thinks of her when he
is alone in the woods on the deer-stand; he sees her face in
the clear waters, when he should look for the hamaycush, the
great salmon of the lakes; he hears her voice on the winds
of heaven, when he should listen `Awunk' of the geese in the
clouds; he dreams of her when he is alone in his wigwam by
night. He loves Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng more than
all the girls of the Iroquois, more than all the daughters of the
pale faces down at the Isle Jesus.[1] Ojibwa girl best of all,
handsomest, most loved. Ojibwa girl be the wife of the Bald-Eagle.”

“Bald-Eagle,” answered the maiden, calmly and kindly,
“I have heard your words, and marked them. Now hear
mine, and believe them, for they are true.”

“Good,” replied the chief. “Will hear — will believe —
only say `yes;' will love, and take to wigwam.”

“The Bald-Eagle is a great warrior, a great chief. His
arm is very strong in the chase, very strong in the battle: He
can bend his enemies for his pride, he can bend the wild beasts

of the forest for his sport, he can bend the trees of the wood
for his pleasure, but he can not bend the heart of a young girl,
he can only break it. Hark you, Bald-Eagle, a great chief
and warrior should not lead an unwilling bride to his wigwam.
A bride's eyes should look forward always, never look backward.
A bride's eyes should be blind to the face of her father,
her ears should be deaf to the calling of her mother. She
should see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing, but her
husband. Bald-Eagle, the eyes of Ahsahgunushk look back
always, look forward not at all. She sees only gray hairs —
only the gray hairs of Chingwauk, the great chief of the Ojibwas.
She hears only a thin voice, only a thin, old, sorrowful
voice; it is the voice of her mother calling the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind
— calling to her to return to the hunting-ground
of the Ojibwas. Bald-Eagle, her eyes are so full of the past
that she can not see the present, can not see the future. Her
eyes are so full of tears,” and in truth they did fill and overflow
as she uttered the words, “so full of tears that she can
not see the face of the young warrior — her ears are stopped up
by the calling of her mother that she can not hear the voice
of the young brave. His form may be comely to the sight of
others, but it is not comely to the sight of Ahsahgunushk.
His voice may sound pleasant to the hearing of others, but it
is not pleasant to the ears of Ahsahgunushk. She can not be
the wife of Bald-Eagle. I have spoken.”

The young man glared at her with a vacant eye, and blank
expression for a moment, as if he had not clearly comprehended
what she said. But a minute afterward the blood came
hotly and fiercely to his cheek, his lip curled scornfully, his
eye flashed with a vengeful and malignant fire.

“It is a lie!” he said, not passionately but sullenly, resolutely;
and as he spoke his features again became impassive
as they had been before he heard her. “I have heard a

voice,” he continued, “but it was a lying voice — a voice very
bad, very forked, even as the tongue of the rattlesnake that
lies among the rocks — a bad, lying voice. Her eyes do not
look backward, they look forward. Her eyes do not see the
face of Chingwouk, nor do her ears hear the voice of her
Ojibwa mother. If her heart is not in the wigwam of the
Bald-Eagle, neither is it in the far away hunting-grounds of
the Ojibwa. If her eyes can not see the form, neither her
ears hear the voice of the Bald-Eagle, neither are they blinded
by tears for the Ojibwa, nor stopped up by the callings
of her mother. If the Bald-Eagle be not comely to her sight,
nor his voice pleasant to her ear, it is because the face of another
is dearer, and the voice of another sounds sweeter. If
she will not enter the wigwam of the Bald-Eagle, it is because
she would enter the wooden house of the pale-faces. If
she will not be the wife of the Bald-Eagle, it is because she
would be the wife of the priest — the young priest of the pale-faces.”

As he uttered the last words in a deep, hissing, guttural
voice, his face livid with disappointed pride and envious spite,
and his fine form literally convulsed with fury, she met his
fierce glare with a calm, equable, and unmoved look, nor did
she even blush; for the very intensity of her emotions acted
to prevent the outward manifestation of them; and the shock
which she experienced at discovering that the most sacred
secret of her soul, unconfessed even to her own inmost thoughts,
her silent, hopeless, passionless devotion, had escaped her custody,
that it had been seen by profane eyes, and spoken of by
lips unfriendly and unsanctified, acted upon her system with
such violence as at the same time to stun her nerves, and to
strengthen her moral courage, and she made answer in a calm
voice, and with a firm and unmoved countenance.

“Forbear! Priests have no wives. You speak with a false

tongue. Why are you so bad — why are you so false — why
are you so cruel? If she wished it, and he wished it likewise,
the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind could not be the wife of
the young priest of the pale faces.”

“And if she could, she should not,” retorted the vehement
and enraged warrior. “She shall not! She shall not! while
there is strength in the arm, and blood in the veins, and hatred
in the heart of the Bald-Eagle, she shall not be the wife of the
lying priest. My heart is very hard, my will is very strong.
I have spoken.”

“Go, leave me. You are bad,” cried the girl, actually shivering
through her whole frame with an irrepressible motion of
disgust and abhorrence. “That not the way for chief to speak
to girl. Do you think so to win heart, to get good thoughts,
to buy love? I tell you not so, not so. That the way to make
young girl fear — no, not fear! Ojibwa girl fears nothing — but
hate, loathe, despise — yes, despise — make, Ojibwa girl despise
you — you, great, brave chief of the Iroquois — despise
you, Bald-Eagle.”

“The Ojibwas are dogs,” answered the Huron warrior,
savagely. “Their women are she-dogs. They are not fit to
be the wives of warriors, or the mothers of braves. They are
good only to hoe corn, and carry water for the pale-faces. To
sit upon the knees of pale priests by the fire, and to kiss their
lips, and be their cast-aways. The Ojibwa girls are she-dogs,
that whine for the dogs of the pale-faces. Wagh! I
spit upon them — they are unchaste she-dogs.”

The maiden's face flushed crimson at the insult, and her
beautiful soft eyes seemed literally to flash living fire, as she
turned short upon the taunter.

“You coward!” she exclaimed, with vehement and passionate
indignation. “I say you coward, Bald-Eagle, to speak
such words to a good girl. You coward, not warrior — you

liar, not chief. You Iroquois, I say, not Ojibwa. Go, go,
Ojibwa girl hate now — Iroquois girl shall hate soon, when I
tell them. All tribe shall hate — old chief, old squaw, young
warriors, young girls, all shall hate, all despise you?”

Goaded almost to madness by her vehement and indignant
reproaches, the Bald-Eagle rose to his feet, and passing with
a light and even foot down the canoe to the place where she
sat, still swelling with violent emotion, and more beautiful for
the very anger that warmed her into such impetuous life, and
grasping her tightly by the slender wrist, raised his right
hand and smote her with his open palm once, and again across
the cheek so forcibly as to leave the score of his fingers impressed
on the delicate and tender flesh.

A loud shout from the bank whereon several of the lay
brothers were assembled, and yet a shriller cry of indignation
from the Huron girls on the opposite shore, evinced the indignation
which his cowardly act had excited; but ere there was
time to mark the effect on his mind, she cast him from her
with such energy that he lost his balance, and as the fragile
canoe swayed with the motion, fell headlong overboard in the
deep water; while with a bitter, scornful laugh, she dipped
her paddle into the current, and steered swiftly back to the
wharf of the Jesuit Mission.

4. CHAPTER IV.
THE CONFESSION.

Angry and vehement indignation possessed the mind of the
Ojibwa girl, as she came ashore at the dock from which she
had so recently departed, and received the warmest expression
of sympathy from the lay-brothers of the order, who had seen
the outrage committed, and who, notwithstanding that they well
knew the inferior position which was occupied by women in
the Indian tribes, and the slight estimation in which they were
held, could not overlook, or behold, save with indignant eyes
and wounded feelings, anything so gross and unmanly as a
heavy blow dealt by a powerful warrior against a delicate and
fragile girl. Ahsahgunushk, moreover, was a general favorite
in the Mission. Her beauty, her gentleness and intelligence, had
won for her the regard and esteem of all, even of the grave and
abstracted elders, while among the younger, and especially the
lay companions of the society, she was looked upon with a
warmer and more human feeling, and there were probably many
among them, even of gentle birth from Normandy, Touraine,
and the soft Mediterranean shores of France, who would willingly
have overlooked the dark complexion of the Indian maid,
and, in their voluntary isolation from the charms of the fairer
females of their own race, would have gladly, too gladly, taken
her to be a sharer of the toils, and a consoler of the tedium of
the wilderness.

There was, however, at all times, a tranquil and dignified
reserve evinced by the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind, which had
kept all her admirers somewhat at a distance, a calm and unsuspecting

coldness in her manner of receiving their compliments
and courtesy, as if they were either mere jests, or civilities
due to her rank and position, which had deterred them
from making advances, which, gay and light-hearted and self-confident
as these young Frenchmen were, in common with
most of their countrymen, they could yet understand it to be
doubtful whether she would receive with favor.

Her eyes were very bright, as she landed, and gleaming with
wounded pride, and a keen sense of the degradation, which had
been inflicted on her by that blow, given in the presence of the
white men, who abhorred and repressed to the utmost of their
ability the servitude and ignominious station which was inflicted
on the wives of the aborigines. Nor, although it was no uncommon
thing for an Indian to inflict personal chastisement on
an offending wife, nor by any means considered degrading
either to the recipient or the inflicter of the punishment, was
it usual or decorous, or indeed allowable for a chief even of the
highest caste and distinction, to strike a maiden, especially if
she were the daughter of a chief and of a time-honored race.

Making her way rapidly through the sympathizing and attentive
group, with a burning cheek, on which the marks of that
coward blow was still visible, and a downeast eye, answering
their remarks of sympathy, and their offers of prompt redress,
by monosyllables only, she took her way toward the fort, with
the intention, at first, of repairing immediately to Father Borromee,
and of laying her heart open to him, and demanding his
protection and support against her savage wooer. Before she
reached the gate, however, a change came over the current of
her thoughts, she hesitated, paused, and finally turned off into
a side alley or avenue of the garden, screened from view by an
espalier of trained fruit-trees, and over-arched by the luxuriant
tendrils of the vine. As the first eager sense of wrong and
anger began to subside in her bosom, the memory of her late

interview with the Jesuit, the consciousness of her own helpless
passion, the shame of knowing that her secret had been
penetrated by another, and the agonizing fear that it might also
have been discovered by the object, came home to her heart
with sudden and terrible distinctness. The revulsion was instant
and overpowering, and she felt that he, to whom by a
natural impulse she had intended to disclose her wrongs, was
the very last person living to whom she could speak freely on
such a subject, without revealing her secret, even if at this
time it was not already revealed to him, from whom she would
have most desired to hide it.

Then this reflection suggested yet another train of thought,
and she began to ponder deeply on the confessional, which she
had been enjoined to attend on the morrow; on the secret —
the guilty secret as she half believed it, which she would be
compelled to relate with her own trembling lips, to his astonished
and perhaps indignant ears, whom it concerned the most:
and to wonder how she should ever find courage for the task,
or arrange her thoughts, and frame her words to syllable a confession
so humiliating to pure and delicately-minded woman,
as the avowal, that she had given her love, not only unsought,
but where it could not be accepted even when freely tendered,
where it would perhaps be regarded as a sinful and heathenish
artifice, perhaps be cast back upon her with disgust and rejected
with disdain.

Fuller and fuller waxed the overburdened heart, anger and
indignation vanished in an instant, swept away by the full tide
of despairing love, of maiden basefulness, of shame, of terror,
and of deep, desperate self-abasement. The tears swelled fast
and silent to her large dark eyes, and overflowed her burning
cheeks, and abandoning at once the idea of appealing to any
earthly comforter, or seeking any protection or redress from
the friendship of mortal man, she hurried away with fleet, shy

footsteps, to a thick, shadowy arbor, all overrun with wild vines,
creeping plants, ivy, and elematis, at the end of the garden
abutting on the forest, and there casting herself on her knees
and burying her face in her hands, wept bitterly and passionately,
while she prayed fevently for succor and for strength,
to Him, whom she had loved to worship with a sincere and
earnest, though an ignorant and half-superstitious devotion.

Slowly the morning lagged away over the aching head and
throbbing heart of the Ojibwa girl, who still knelt sad and
lonely in the dim bower, battling with her undisciplined heart,
and untamed though innocent affections, while things were passing
in the fort concerning in the last degree the happiness of
her future, which, had she suspected them, would have added
yet wilder anguish to a sorrow, which surely needed no addition.

Scarcely had the Bald-Eagle emerged from the water than
he swam straight across to the Indian shore, and making his
way in obdurate and haughty silence through the company of
Huron girls, who gazed at him with eyes eloquent of tranquil
reproach, and now and then muttered a word of sarcasm or direct
reproach, he entered his own lodge in a mood the most
fiendish — for in that mood were concentrated the disappointment
of a baffled man, the rancorous spite of a jealous man, the
irritated and embittered vanity of a proud and haughty man,
the selfish and stern persistence of an obstinate man, and the
deadly and unforgiving hatred of a pitiless, cold-blooded, remorseless
man, fancying himself wronged, and resolute to gain
his ends, whether by force or fraud, and to be at once gratified
in his passions, and satiated in his thirst for vengeance.

After remaining in this mood, alone in his lodge, for something
better than an hour, he made his appearance again without;
having changed his garments, saturated by the cold waters
of the Wye, and clad himself in his full and ceremonial attire

as the war-chief of his tribe. He was fully armed, too, with
knife and tomahawk of French manufacture, with his bow in
its case, and his quiver full of arrows at his side, and his long-barrelled,
smooth-bored gun in his right hand, while his bullet-pouch
and powder-horn were slung across his shoulders.

Thus equipped and accoutred, he took his place in the stern
of his own canoe, and with half-a-dozen strokes of the paddle
set her across the narrow river, made her fast at the shore, and
walked slowly with a dogged and sullen air, and a firm, haughty,
and insolent carriage, to the entrance into the fort, passing as
he went several of the lay brothers, who had witnessed his
treatment of the girl, and who now looked up from the tasks
about which they were all variously employed, to stare at him
with abhorrent eyes, and to express their disgust and abhorrence
of what they termed the brutality and cowardice of the
man, in no measured terms of reprobation. None of them, indeed,
addressed him directly, probably in their present humor
they would have held it derogatory to themselves to do so, but
they spoke aloud and distinctly, in both the French and the
Iroquois tongues, both of which he perfectly understood; and
they were well assured that no word which fell from their lips
escaped him. Yet he gave no token, by either sign or gesture,
or by any expression of anger, contempt, or emotion, that he
heard or understood them; but passed onward, cold, impassive,
and austere, without changing the position of his head, without
turning an eye toward them, without suffering a muscle of his
face, to display the furious and revengeful rage which must
have been enkindled at his burning and unforgiving heart, by
the terms which he heard applied to himself, terms the last
usually to be applied, and if applied, the first to be resented by
one so proud and arrogant as an Indian chieftain.

On passing through the archway into the interior of the fortress,
for no one had questioned or interrupted him as he entered

the gate in the stockade, he paused and asked of the porter
who was sitting within, cleaning the lock of a harquebuss
where he should see the father Borromee, and his station being
well known and recognised, he was instantly ushered into the
library, where he whom he sought, was seated alone at a large
oaken table, covered with books, manuscripts, and mathematical
instruments, preparing a map, as it would seem, of the great
Georgian bay, with all its islands, and the northern shores
with their net-work of rice lakes, swamps, and noble rivers.

The priest raised his head as the chief entered, and seeing
who it was, invited him courteously to be seated, and inquired
what he could do to pleasure the Bald-Eagle, speaking to him
in the Iroquois dialect, which he used as fluently and even
eloquently as his own polished tongue.

“Justice,” replied the Indian sternly, refusing the seat which
the Jesuit had indicated by a motion of his hand, with a contemptuous
gesture. “The Bald-Eagle is a great chief of the
Hurons, he asks no pleasure of the sons of Jesus, only justice
— only his squaw, and justice.

The priest looked at the man with some astonishment, and
with something of rebuke in his manner, for the tone of the
Indian was arrogant and disrespectful to say the least, and his
air and demeanor bordered on insolence, which the priest,
humble as he was by profession if not by practice, was one
singularly unlikely to endure. He had the rare art, however,
to repress every outward indication of internal emotion, and to
preserve an impassive and inscrutable countenance under all
circumstances of anger, surprise, or apprehension, and he now
looked at his guest steadily and with an inquiring eye, but
manifested neither wonder nor resentment.

“In what does the Bald-Eagle require justice, or against
whom?” he asked at length, “and who is the squaw of the
Huron chief? — I knew not that he was wedded.”

“Not wedded,” replied the dark savage sullenly. “That it
— want be wedded — want justice, want squaw. What for
pale-face want Indian girl? — What for priest want Ojibwa
maiden? Priest not wed any how — priest not have wife —
what for not give Bald-Eagle his own squaw.”

“You must speak plainly, chief,” answered the Jesuit coldly,
“if you wish a reply; much more if you want assistance,
or, as you say, justice. I have neither the time nor the wish to
guess the meaning of riddles, so you must not speak them to
me.”

“Not speak riddles, tell you,” he replied in a fierce tone and
with an angry gesture. “Speak truth. Want squaw, I tell
you. Want Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng; what for not
give her? — what for priest keep her, when can't call wife?”
and he burst out into a long, vehement, and rapid speech, detailing
his love for the Ojibwa captive, asserting his right to
her as the prisoner of his bow and lance, as the adopted daughter
of his father's wigwam, demanding that the priest should
compel her to become his wife, and should forthwith unite her
to him in the bonds of Christian wedlock.

The Jesuit perceived that the Indian was much excited if
not enraged, and being entirely ignorant himself and unsuspicious
of the attachment with which he had unwillingly and
unknowingly inspired the bosom of the maiden, he did not
comprehend, or pay any heed to the obscure allusions of the
jealous and suspicious chief. He asked, therefore, quietly
and in the expectation of receiving an affirmative answer,
whether the girl was willing to become his wife, and beginning
to believe that he had found a clew to the mystery of her
behavior in the interview he had with her in the morning.
What was his surprise then, when he received a reply couched
in tones of insolent fury, and accompanied by a fierce blow of

the clenched hand on the table, which rang and quivered to
the stroke.

“What for ask that, when know?” he shouted. “Know that
she not willing — know that make her himself not willing —
what for priest ask lie-question?”

“How dare you, sirrah,” said the Jesuit, his hot Italian
blood out-boiling at the insult, and his pale face crimsoning
with anger, as he started to his feet, with as much fiery excitement
as though he had been still a warrior, “how dare you,
sirrah, use such terms to me? You must be mad, or drunken
with wine. Begone — quit my presence, nor dare to return
hither till you know how to comport yourself toward your
superiors.”

“How dare?” answered the Indian, glaring at him. “Huron
dare anything — yes, anything. Dare kill priest, if
priest dare take squaw. Not begone at all — not quit presence
till speak mind — till speak all mind, every bit — till told all
truth — till got justice — till got squaw. Superior! Ha!
Where Indian chief's superior? Tell that, ha! tell that. Huron
chief no superior, only the Great Spirit. How you dare
— how you dare, wicked pale-face, how you dare, lying priest,
love Ojibwa girl. How you dare make her love you?” and
without giving the Jesuit time or opportunity to interrupt him,
he poured out a torrent of wild, fierce, impassioned words, explanations,
accusations, demands, denunciations, treats, all
incoherently and almost incomprehensibly blended. At first,
the feelings of the father Borromeè were those of pure wrath
and indignation, coupled with no idea what could be the origin
of this strange conduct and insolent declamation on the
part of one who, if he had been somewhat arrogant and haughty
in the calm and grave austerity which he pictured to himself
as the true mould of dignity, had never before failed of respect,
or given way to bursts of impudent aggression; but by degrees

it began to dawn upon his mind that there might be something
of meaning, as there was undoubtedly much of method in what
he had first regarded as mere madness. He began to recollect
many trifles, which he had scarcely observed, and never noted
before, in the girl's demeanor; he thought of her unusual perturbation,
and the confusion and bashfulness of her manner
during their interview that very morning, and above all, at her
very palpable objection to confess herself to him who had always
before been her chosen director and adviser; and he began
most reluctantly and doubtfully to admit to himself that it
might be, indeed, that she loved him with the unregulated and
artless love of a child of nature, an unschooled daughter of the
wilderness.

This doubtful and most painful sensation led him to supress
his indignation at the mode in which the chief addressed him,
and, though he felt himself pure and self-acquitted, he was inclined
to feel and make allowance also for the disappointment,
the jealousy, and the rage of the baffled and rejected suitor,
and in some sort to pity rather than to blame the sufferer too
severely. To one so acute a reasoner on the motives which
sway the human breast, so wise a judge of the actions, so close
and correct a scrutinizer of the thoughts of men, it was not
difficult to obtain from the passionate and fluent lips of the
Huron chief a full recital of all that had occurred between him
and the maiden, even to her positive rejection of his suit, and
the blow which he had dealt her in the vexation of his spirit.
And while he was, indeed, wringing every word, every admission
from the unwilling lips of the warrior by dint of the most
rigid and ingenious cross-examination, the Indian never entertained
a suspicion how completely he was cheated out of his
unintended confidence, but fancied that he was heaping coals
of fiery retribution on the head of the priest, and confounding
him by the revelations of his own villany.

At length he ended, as he had commenced, by a demand
that the girl should be immediately compelled, by the censure
and authority of the church, to become his wife, willing or
unwilling, and united to him in due ceremonial on the following
day in presence of the congregation.

To this demand the priest replied at length, but by what was
in fact a simple and direct refusal to do what was required,
and a positive denial of the existence in himself, or in the
church which he represented, of any authority or power, such
as should compel a girl to bestow herself in marriage contrary
to her own choice and conviction; and though he treated the
suspicion that she was moved by any attachment to himself —
an attachment of which he spoke, could such a thing be, as
corrupt, sinful, adulterous, nay, almost incestuous — as a mere
chimera and hallucination of morbid and exaggerated jealousy,
though he endeavored with all his powers of eloquence, with
all his influence over the spiritual terrors of the half-converted
savage, to convince, to soothe, to console him — though he
offered sympathy, advice, and aid, though he offered to act as
mediator with the maiden, even while he refused positively to
exercise any coercion, or even persuasion, it was all in vain.
The rage of the Indian was deeply grounded — his suspicions
were converted into certainties, and his own alternatives were
instant possession of the girl, or vengeance, deep, thorough,
and eternal, on all who bore the name, or wore the hue, of
Christians and pale-faces. With words such as these, and a
glare of the eye that portended deadly mischief, he turned on
his heel, and left the Jesuit, who, now roused again to indignation,
was rebuking him severely for his perversity and hardness
of heart, and threatening him with the terrors of excommunication.

Sullenly, silently he strode back to his canoe, repassed the
river, and returning to the village, where he learned that the

Reed-shaken-by-the-wind had not yet returned home, but was
believed to be sheltered in the fort of the pale-faces, whither
she had been seen to repair, he once more retired to his own
lodge, where he proceeded without delay to make all preparations
for a hurried departure and long absence from the settlement.

At evening, when the tribesmen and chiefs returned from
the chase, the fisheries, and the fields — for many of them,
under the teaching of the good Jesuits, had learned something
of agriculture, and applied themselves to the cultivation of
maize, beans, and other esculent roots or grains — the Bald-Eagle
was awaiting them by the council-fire, where, without
the slightest allusion to what had passed between himself and
the girl, or any allusion to her name, he announced to them his
intention of going on a great hunt down the shores of the lake,
to be absent for a moon at the least, and perhaps for a yet
longer period. Such voyages were not uncommon among the
bolder and more adventurous of the tribesmen, so that no wonder
was manifested, though several of the younger of the warriors
desired permission to accompany him, in pursuit, as they
expected, of both sport and profit, if not of honor; the fur-bearing
animals were then abundant in those regions, and peltries
were already beginning to be an article of considerable value,
both for use and for exportation, with the Frenchmen of the
provinces lower down the St. Lawrence, with whom a communication
was maintained by means of canoes and bateaux,
which came up through the inland water-courses of lakes and
rivers, interrupted by occasional portages, but extending far to
the northward from the mouth of the French river, on the
Georgian bay, to that of the great Ottawa river, above a thousand
miles below, close to the rising settlement of Montreal.

Companionship such as this would not, however, have suited
in the least the views of intentions of the Bald-Eagle, who

contented himself by merely expressing his intention to go
alone, and by indicating the inferior chief to whose guidance
and direction in the hunts and fisheries he desired his young
men to submit themselves. Nor did he depart without instructing
his tribesmen to watch over the safety of the good
pale-faces, to supply them with a due proportion of the venison,
the ducks, the bear's-meat, as well as of the white fish and
mamaycush which should fall to the share of the tribe during
the latter summer and the autumn.

This done, and all arrangements having been duly made, his
largest and best canoe having been newly gummed and fitted
out with his fur robes and blankets, his fishing spears, and
traps, and implements of all kinds, in addition to his much-prized
gun, and culinary apparatus, meager and simple as that
was, as well as with a store of parched and unparched corn,
sugar, and tobacco, the Bald-Eagle wandered out into the
camp, or village, and strayed through it to and fro, as if without
any object, but, in truth, with a hope, if it were not with
an expectation, that he should learn something of the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind,
if he should not succeed in seeing her
once more before departing on the journey, which he trusted
would result in making her his own for ever.

She did not, however, meet his eye — for, in truth, overpowered
with anxiety, and worn-out by the vehemence of her
passions, she had sunk gradually from sobbing into sleep within
the precincts of that green sequestered arbor, and was now
slumbering in the gray gloaming of the summer's evening, forgetful
of all her sorrows, and forgotten or neglected alike by
all her friends and foes, if she indeed had any of the latter,
save the enamored and irritated warrior, whose thoughts dwelt
on her altogether, even while his pride prevented him from
making any direct inquiries of her presence, or her absence,
from the wigwam of his father.

None of the girls of the tribe had seen her, indeed, since she
walked directly toward the fort after the indignity which had
been offered her, but they all believed her to have sought protection
from the insolence of her overbearing lover at the hands
of the fathers, and they all rejoiced at the evident annoyance
and disappointment of the chief, whose unrequited love for the
Ojibwa captive had not escaped their quick-sighted eyes, and
whose overbearing demeanor, headstrong temper, and stern
rudeness of disposition, had so little endeared him to his tribeswomen,
that they were certainly anything rather than annoyed
by his unquestionable rage and spite, the causes of which, as
well as of his unexpected departure, was no secret to them at
least, whatever it might be to the males of their tribe.

In the meantime twilight fell thick and gray; the nighthawks
wheeled aloft on balanced wings with their mournful
and oft-repeated call; the katydids, those shrill alaras of the
west, opened their shrill, sonorous serenade; the frogs commenced
their loud, nocturnal concert from the shallow marshes
and dank meadow edges; the great owls hooted from the forest-depths,
and were answered by the echoes through the
breezeless night-air; the myriads of bright fire-flies lighted
their amorous torches, and flitted fast and far, now glimmering
clearly, now vanishing into thick gloom, over the dewy
grass, and among the fragrant underwood; the fishes leaped
out of the water at the swarming insects, and fell back with a
short splash on the surface; and, ever and anon, the long,
melancholy howl of a wolf would rise upon the night, and die
away in lugubrious cadences, striking a singular and deep awe
into the boldest heart. It was night in the wilderness. The
evening-bell of the Mission had rung its last sweet chime,
and the long swell of the choral voices had sent up the vesper
hymn to the Virgin Mother from the wood-girded sanctuary.
The stars came out thick and bright, like diamond-gems set in

the dark azure canopy of the summer night, and after a while
the broad moon, now approaching to the full, soared up above
the verdurous tree-tops, filling the heavens with her serene
and holy light, and casting a broad, wavering path of silver
adown the middle of the river, enclosed on this hand and on
that by the deep, black shadows on the walls of stately evergreens,
which towered up from the margin of the brimful current,
so that no human eye could discern which was the limit
between the low shore and the level water.

As the light fell upon the bosom of the waters, the canoe
of the Bald-Eagle shot out from the shore, and under the
noiseless guidance of his well-managed paddle, went down the
stream toward the outlet, and, long before the first paly glimmer
of the dawn had told of the returning day, was skimming
the surface of the broad lake near to the islet-rock known as
the giant's grave, leaving no trace of the path he had taken,
nor to be seen again by Jesuit or neophyte, till days had run
on into weeks, till weeks had become months, and the green
robes of the summer forest had been exchanged for the gorgeous
purples, the crimsons, and the gold of their autumnal garniture.

As the chief's canoe darted away and was lost in the darkness,
a change seemed to come over the village; a change of
cheerfulness and merriment, for the gay, light-hearted laughter
of the happy girls, and now and then a snatch of wild-resounding
song, rose up from the neighborhood of the watch-fires,
and the joyous shout of playful children, which had been all
silenced and held in sullen constraint by the perverse authority
and gloomy mood of the war-chief, burst out with redoubled
glee, freed from the restraint imposed by his unwelcome presence.
He had gone unregretted — and it was evident enough
that his return, be it late or early, would meet with no sincere
or earnest welcome.

And still in her forest-bower, under the pale lustre of the
moon, Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng slept like an innocent
and happy flower, folded in the fragrance of her own sweet
thoughts, and unguarded; except by His care, who watches
ever over the repose of the spotless and the young. All night
long she slept dreamless and uninterrupted, until the morning
was beginning to grow gray in the east, and one or two of the
earliest birds began to chirp and flutter in the branches, then
she awoke suddenly, and with something of a start, and even
after she was awake she looked around for the moment thoughtfully
and doubtfully, as if she were endeavoring to collect
herself, and to remember how or wherefore she had passed
the night in that unusual and unfrequented spot.

Few minutes sufficed to bring everything that had passed
on the previous day to her memory, nor that only, for she remembered
somewhat uneasily, that she had the task of confession
before her, and while she recoiled, as a delicate and virtuous
girl must recoil naturally, from owning that she had
granted her love unsolicited, and that she still loved on, not
wisely, but too well, and that so she must go on living hopeless
of return, until life itself should be over; still, as a sincere
and faithful catholic, she never contemplated anything
short of confessing the whole undisguised and undistorted
truth, believing that otherwise she could not so much even as
hope for salvation, and confident that she should receive consolation
and pity for weakness, though she looked for no sympathy,
and absolution of her sin from her gentle and grave
director.

This morning, too, in the pure light of the early dawn, in
the soft and gentle air, and in the midst of all sweet rural
sounds and sights, apart from any external influences to disturb,
or internal emotions to distract her mind, she could think
and reason more rationally, and with a clearer judgment of her

duties and her rights, both as a Christian and woman, than
she had been able to do when struggling in the first pangs of a
newly-comprehended and hopeless attachment, and striving
against the haughty and over-mastering will of a being at once
powerful and selfish, with whom contention must be difficult,
if not altogether vain, and whom she regarded with abhorrence
the more settled in proportion to the obstinacy with
which he seemed resolved to press on her his odious suit.

Now, therefore, she had neither doubt nor fear, but resolved
at once to attend the regular service of the day, to pour out
her whole soul in the confessional, to implore the protection
of the order against the oppressor of the Iroquois, and if she
could avert by no other means that detested union, to devote
herself to perpetual celibacy, becoming the bride of heaven,
and giving up for ever all vain imaginations, all hopes of the
woman's brightest prospect, a happy wedded life, and a serene
old age, and peaceful death-bed, amid the quiet tears of affectionate
and mournful children.

No sooner had she collected her thoughts, and made up her
mind as to the course she would pursue, than she stole rapidly
through the dimmest and least-frequented walks to the edge
of the river, for she knew not as yet whether the inhabitants
of the fort were stirring and the gates open, and she had no
desire to call attention to her proceedings, or to be required to
reply to any question as to the where or wherefore she had
passed that night beyond the precincts of the village, and without
her own lodge. But it was too early as yet for her fears
to be justified, the dwellers in the mission-house were all still
buried in deep sleep, and the girl made her way, unobserved,
down to the spot where she had left her canoe, unfastened it
from the pile to which she had attached the painter, and paddling
rapidly over to the other shore, stole with a foot so light
and noiseless among the skin-tents, and wood-built lodges of

the village, that she reached her own wigwam unsuspected,
and when an hour or two afterward, when the camp was
awakened, and the dim voices were heard once more on the
peaceful banks of the Wye, she issued from the door of her
dwelling, with her hair neatly dressed, her dress decorously
arranged, and her dark skin healthfully glowing after her usual
bath in the clear, cold waters of the neighboring river. There
was some little hurry and excitement displayed by the Huron
girls as they saw their companion, absent as they knew her to
have been at the close of night, issue from her dwelling as
tranquilly as if she had passed the night therein in customary
sleep, but they betrayed no indiscreet curiosity, no uttered
remarks even to her, much less to others, which would induce
any questions or remarks concerning her disappearance and
return. After awhile, however, when they were satisfied that
the suspicions of none of the chiefs pointed to the subject of
their own surmises, they all began to crowd around her, to
inquire into the cause and the meaning of the strange scene
which they had observed on board the canoe, and to tell her of
the departure of the Bald-Eagle on a long hunting-excursion,
which they all attributed unanimously to her peremptory rejection
of the young warrior's suit.

The Reed-shaken-by-the-wind replied as slightly and indefinitely
as might be; but her surprise and pleasure at the
unexpected and welcome departure of the chief, were too great
and too sincere to be disguised, much less concealed, and she
laughed as heartily and gayly as if she had not spent half the
preceding day and night in tears that would not be consoled,
when the girls described with faint mimicry the gloomy and sullen
disappointment with which the Bald-Eagle had stalked to
and fro among the lodges, from dewy eve well-nigh to midnight
in search of her, though he had been too cunning to ask any
overt questions, and had departed without suffering any one of

the warriors to suspect the reasons of his going, or ascertaining
where she was whose repulse had driven him to seek
consolation in the wild sports of the woods and waters.

Hope cheerfully dawned in the poor girl's breast as she listened,
and she fully believed that between shame at the unmanly
part he had played — striking a woman before the eyes
of so many witnesses — and mortification at the unfavorable
reception of his addresses, he had abandoned the pursuit, and
taken this way of showing her that he had withdrawn himself
in the capacity of suitor, and she now felt that she could go
through the duty to which she had bound herself, not contentedly
only, but gratefully, and with a good hope of favorable
and happy results. For she was a woman of strong mind and
energetic will, and once convinced that her love was hopeless,
vain, and unmaidenly, if not actually sinful and impious, she
was not one to suffer it to haunt her to her misery and degradation,
but to tear it from her heart of hearts, even if the heart-strings
must needs break with the shock.

By the time that the few light feminine duties of the day
were performed, and the morning-meal prepared and taken,
the bell began to announce that it was holyday, and to summon
the dusky worshippers to be present at the celebration of high
mass in the chapel, whither the brethren were even now congregating;
and with their humble offerings, and innocent and
happy hearts, the poor Indian maidens hastened to meet their
spiritual advisers, and to do homage at the altar of grace.

The service was performed, all shorn of the splendors of its
pompous and sublime ceremonial, a few home-made candles
only gleaming through the mist of incense collected from the
native gums and aromatics of the forest, ministered by no
splendidly-attired priests in alt, and cope, and dalmatique, nor
harbingered by the glorious swell of sacred music and the
deep diapason of the pealing organ, but it was heard by humble

and attentive ears, and garnered up in penitent and trusting
hearts; and it may well be that the little flock gathered
from the howling wilderness into the fold of the truth, was
found more acceptable in the eyes of the All-seeing than many
a wealthier and prouder congregation. After the masses were
ended, a few of the warriors and many of the younger girls
entered the confessional, and after recounting their simple
errors, and rehearsing their half-unconscious doubts, briefly received
full absolution. But not till all beside had departed did
Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng enter the stall of the penitent,
so that no ear heard the deep sobs of shame and anguish with
which she rehearsed her sad but sinless tale, or marked the
suppressed groans of the strong-minded, energetic man who
listened to her artless speech; but when they issued from the
chapel, all saw that the sweet maiden's face was radiant with
tranquil peace and serene happiness, while the high features
of the Father Borromeè were darker and more gloomy than
their wont. That night he kept vigils alone before the cross,
and the clang of the self-inflicted scourge was heard above the
“culpa mea,” and the “ora pro nobis,” and the steps of the
high altar reeked red on the morrow with dark blood-gouts
from the lacerated flesh of the self-condemned and penitent
ascetic, who visited thus grievously upon himself the punishment
of his unconscious error, hoping that therefore vengeance
would hold aloof from him hereafter, and the atonement be
accepted on high.

5. CHAPTER V.
THE RETURN.

Days had coursed onward until they became weeks, weeks
had been numbered until months had flown; the deep blue
skies of July and August had exchanged their rich azure hue
for the soft golden lustre and mellow purple haze of Indian
summer; the green leaves of the forest had put on the colors
of the rainbow, and reflected in the transparent waters of the
lake and its tributaries floated double, reality and semblance
indistinguishable. The wild-pigeons had ceased to obscure
the sun with the migrations of their countless myriads, the
wild ducks had come in by thousands and hundreds of thousands
from the northward, and ever and anon in the early gray
of the dawning, and among the dank dews falling thick at eventide,
the hoarse “hawnking” of the innumerable phalanxes of
geese might be heard clamoring and clanging amid the clouds
as they oared their way through the thin, pallid air, with the
slow, circular sweep of their huge pinions, to their warm hybernacula
in the sounds and lagoons of the Atlantic waters,
and the tepid pools and evergreen morasses of the southern
Florida

The Iroquois, their autumnal hunts and fisheries ended, had
come in for the most part to the village, and absented themselves
now for days only, not for weeks, for the lake was almost
continually stirred into wrath by the northwestern gales,
and its surface was ploughed up into long, ridgy rollers, bursting
and curling their white and foamy caps, and threatening

destruction to stronger and more solidly-built vessels, if less
buoyant, than the fragile bark canoes of the Indians.

The wigwams, from the richest to the poorest, were well
provided with meat. Deer had been taken in abundance,
many bears had been brought in, ducks by hundreds and geese
by scores, with salmon-trout and white-fish by the quintal were
smoking at the fires of every lodge, even the poorest. The
storehouse and garners of the Mission were literally overflowing
with the produce of the fields and gardens, blessed this
year with abundant crops, and with the flesh and fowl of the
forest, and the fish of the great waters, so that they could right
easily have braved the coming inclement season, heedless of
fresh supplies, not for themselves alone, but for the friendly
neophytes, should any chance or improvidence cause them to
fall short of provisions during the season of snows, when the
lakes are bound with fetters of thick-ribbed ice, and the forest
tracts buried in deepest snows, present no inducement to the
hunter to brave fatigue and famine in traversing their vacant
and inhospitable recesses, for the deer had already for the
most part gone southward, and moose and cariboo, the great
winter game of the northern wilderness, are not found generally
to the west or southward of the great Canadian Ottawa.

In the meantime, all peacefully and happily had the days of
summer ebbed away over the heads of the unwarlike, and unambitious
Jesuits, all calmly and bounteously had their labors
in the earlier seasons been repaid by the abundant ingatherings
of the rich autumn. The gardens still wore a gay aspect, for
the grapes, golden and purple, still adorned the vines with
clusters worthy of la belle France, and among the sere leaves
of the orchards glanced pippin as lustrous in their tints as the
most brilliant of fair Normandy, the land of sparkling cider
vats, sacred, above all others, to Pomona. The maize-fields
had yielded their abundance, and the great golden pumpkins

had been gathered into the stores and root-houses, ample provision
for their stock of domestic animals during the rigors of
the approaching winter.

During the latter days many of the younger priests of the
order, and all the lay-brethren, as the fields no longer claimed
their labors or occupied their time, had given some hours of
each morning to the bold and perilous excitement of the chase,
which was not to them so much a sport, as a resource for the
maintenance of their tables and the clothing of their bodies,
and — for they were not, as I have observed, home-keeping and
half-emasculated drones, like the dwellers of European convents,
but bold, practical, energetic, well-disciplined, equally
fitted for the hardships of the wilderness and the intrigues of
polished cabinets, or the casuistry of rival churches — great
had been their success, and well night invaluable their spoils
won in the forest. Many a lordly buck had been brought in
many-antlered; many a sturdy bear had contributed his massy
chine and huge hams to the flesh-pots and salting-tubs, and his
robes to the simple but efficient tanneries of the natives, and
as the days waned gradually more, and the mornings opened
late, and the evenings closed in early, the workshops gave employment,
the forge glowed, and the anvils rang, the laboratories
had their votaries, the library was crowded with nocturnal
students, pouring forth lore of every kind, manuscripts,
and plans, and maps; histories, treatises, geology, natural sciences,
casuistry, policy, and theology, all finding their several
authors, all going to swell the bulk of documents, which should
be transmitted to Montreal, and thence across the broad Atlantic,
with the departure of the spring caravan of voyageurs
and Indians, down the intricate water-courses and over the
rugged portages of the lake Nipissing and the roaring rapids
of the vast Ottowa. Alas! that it was not so fated.

Nor in the interval of the Bald-Eagle's absence had things

not gone well with the beautiful and bright, now joyous and
serene as ever, and as of old the charm of all, and seemingly
at least, the happiest of the happy; for from the day which
had seen the departure of the young chief, and the confession
of her hopeless passion to the well-regulated and self-restrained
director of her conscience, she had felt herself liberated from
the persecution she had endured from the young Iroquois, had
ceased to brood over a passion half-imaginative and dangerous
only because it had been indulged and brooded over in silence
and solitude, and had so far at least eradicated it, that she felt
no warmer emotion toward her grave and pure-minded adviser,
than a child might feel toward a gentle and indulgent father,
or a much younger sister to a kind and devoted brother. And
he, as soon as he perceived that the mind of the maiden was
not really diseased, but only lightly touched by thick-coming
fancies, and emotions proceeded from a stricken imagination
rather than from a wounded heart, had demeaned himself toward
her with so much quiet skill in the treatment of human
affections, not appearing to avoid her or to consider that there
was anything wrong, but seeming to consider the whole rather
at an end so soon as it was confessed and absolution granted,
and bore himself so paternally, so gravely, and yet so benignantly,
that what might by a different line of conduct have
been exaggerated into a baneful, sinful, and unconquerable passion,
speedily declined into a pure, a genial, and a hallowed
affection, even as the fiery glow and consuming heat of a midsummer's
noon, mellows and melts away into the soft and delicious
warmth of tranquil dewy eve, with the crescent moon
and holiest evening star replacing the intense and sultry daygod.

And in their self-denial and self-conquest, both were happy,
he in his priestly wisdom and manly virtue, she in her innocence
and maiden purity. Both had been tempted in some

sort, both had striven against the tempter, both had conquered,
and met each one the appropriate and sure reward which never
fails to follow self-resistance and self-conquest, the balm of a
tranquil spirit, the blessed consolation of a self-approving and
self-gratulating heart.

On a fitting opportunity, so soon as he perceived that she
was seriously and sincerely struggling with herself, he had related
to her much, more perhaps than he had ever done to
any human being, of the trials, the sorrows, the agonies, the
temptations, and the triumph of his past life. How he had
won fame and wealth, high name and rank on the battle-field,
only to lavish them on one, the fairest of her sex, but, alas!
almost the frailest; how she had been his own — all, as he
vainly dreamed, his own — for a few short months of perfect
bliss and rapture; how she had fallen from the way of virtue,
and become the merest castaway; how in disgust and disappointment
he had taken up the cross of Christ, and borne it
faithfully, until the seed sown in bitterness and misery bore
good fruit unto righteousness: how in after-days she came to
him a penitent, unknowing that he to whom she came imploring
heavenly pardon, had himself so much to forgive; and
how it was the happiest moment of an unhappy life, when he
could believe her reconciled to man and to God, and pronounce
her absolution with an undoubting heart. She died, and his
love which had never faltered, though imperious honor forbade
him to indulge or display it, slept beside her in the grave of
the repentant sinner, illumining her memory and gilding her
ashes, like sunshine on a nameless monument. He told her
how, in after-days, it was his happy lot to fall in with the destroyer
of his love, his honor, of all but his virtue and his reason,
depressed as he was depraved, deep sunk in misery as in
crime; how when vengeance was easy alike and certain, un-recognised
himself he recognised his mortal foe, relieved his

wants, consoled his parting agonies, and abstained even from
heaping the coals upon his guilty head, by whispering, “Lo!
I am he, whom thou didst rob of all that made life happy,” but
suffered him in charity to pass away, supposing his kind benefactor
to be but another good Samaritan, who had ministered
to his necessities, and little suspecting that he was one who
might be regarded as the avenger of blood, soothing the death-bed
of his heart's murderer.

She wept as the father calmly recited the tale of his own
grievous sorrows, and as she perceived how bitter they had
been as compared with her own, and how light, in truth, were
her own annoyances and trials, she could not persist in obstinate
and sullen grief, even had she been more inclined than
she indeed was to perversity of temper, but giving herself up
entirely to the strengthening influence of his right admonitions,
she took to herself fortitude with humility, and resignation
with hope, and soon and with little difficulty subdued her own
heart, and was once more as single-hearted and serene a
maiden as any within the sound of the silver bell of the Jesuits.

Touched by her docile, moreover, and deeply moved by the
earnest and enthusiastic will and spirit which lay concealed
under an exterior so artless, so affectionate and child-like, the
father Borromee had promised her, that in case of the return
of the Bald-Eagle, and the renewal on his part of attempt to
coerce or terrify her into an unwilling marriage, he would use
his influence with the elder chiefs of the tribe to prevent the
consummation of sacrifice, and should remonstrance and rebuke
prove ineffectual, that he would himself take her under
his protection, and set his absolute veto on the unpermitted
contract; and calmed instantly by that promise she recovered
all her wonted cheer and merry lightness of heart, for of a
truth she believed his will to be irresistible, his authority over
the greatest chiefs of the most puissant tribes undoubted, and

his power but little inferior to that of the omnipotent and omnipresent
Ruler, whose majesty and mightiness his eloquent
words had proclaimed to the people, and whose delegated authority
he seemed to sway with a will so serene and steady, a
fortitude so perfect, and a benevolence so God-like. And
doubtless, when he promised, he believed himself certain of
ability to perform, nor doubted that his power was as absolute
over the minds and tempers of his Indians in matters temporal,
as it was over their souls in things spiritual.

Father Borromee, it must be remembered, was not the superior
of the establishment by rank or by seniority, though in
all respects as regarded the governance of men's minds, the
practical affairs of the order, the domestic and political economy
of the mission, he was by far more eminently qualified
than the actual president, a much older man, deeply versed in
the lore and the tactics of the cloister, an able casuist, a subtle
theologist, and an apt, courtier-like, soft-mannered politician
of courts and cabinets; and, with the rare skill which the
Jesuits invariably brought to bear on all worldly matters, this
fact was at once acknowledged, and the whole practical and
physical management of the missions was attributed to and
performed by Father Borromee, who had therefore come to be
regarded by the Indians as in truth the great man; while the
real president, living in abstraction and apart, dealing more
with books than with men, often employed in abstruse sciences,
which they regarded as magical, both in their causes and
effects, never taking any part in either the labors of the field
or the toils of the chase, and never, in fact, descending upon
the scene at all, nisi dignus víndice nodus, was looked upon
almost as a supernatural being, and supposed by some to be a
direct emanation from and representative of the Great Spirit.

Such was the position of affairs at the fort, and such the
circumstances of the various personages, when, in the last

days of October, without its being asserted that any one had
seen him or fallen in with his tracks, or with any signs of his
presence, it began to be whispered among the Indians that
the Bald-Eagle was in the neighborhood; and what seemed
strange, the rumor was coupled to a singular and unusual sort
of excitement, not apparently unmingled with some sort of
blind apprehension, which might well degenerate into some
panic terror.

This rumor coming to the ears of Father Borromeè, he
called some of the elder chiefs to council, and finding that the
tribe had been preparing their arms, and had even gone so far
as to post sentinels on several occasions, he applied himself
earnestly to inquire into the causes of their belief of the Bald-Eagle's
presence in the vicinity, and yet more, of their seemingly
unaccountable apprehension of peril, since it was certain
that no hostile Indian tribe had their hunting-grounds, or any
permanent place of residence within a hundred leagues at least
of the fort on the Wye. Still, however, strange as it seemed
and fanciful, and altogether improbable that anything of the
kind should be brewing, the Jesuit was so well aware of the
singular combination of superstition and shrewdness which
exists in the Indian character, and of their marvellous instinctive
faculty of foreseeing events ere they come to pass — the
result, doubltess, of some inductive and reasoning process,
starting from certain facts known to themselves, and thence
working to conclusions, but that process one which either they
can not or will not explain — that he would not give up the
matter without a painful and close investigation. He could
discover nothing, however, of the least moment. For every
one of the chiefs asserted positively, and in terms which admitted
of no qualification, that no tidings had been received in
any manner of the Bald-Eagle since the night of his departure,
that they had no suspicion where he was, whither he had

gone, or what detained him so late at a distance from the hunting-grounds
of the tribe, and that, too, at a season when it
might be confidently expected that a few more days at farthest
would bring snow, and a week or two longer would close up
the lakes and rivers with icy chains, indissoluble until the return
of spring. Still they all stuck religiously to their opinion,
although they could give no earthly reason for their entertaining
it. “That may be he very much near-by — may be come
to-morrow — may be next day.” Nor did one of them fail to
assert his belief that “Something bad not far off — may be bad
Indian coming.” It was useless, of course, to argue with
them, and, in fact, the Jesuit was so much struck by the unanimity
and pertinacity with which they held fast to their belief,
that he felt no inclination to argue them out of it, but
rather encouraged them to keep a good look-out, and even advised
the setting of a nightly-watch, the distribution of the
arms and ammunition to the brethren and lay-brothers, and
even the loading of the wall-pieces nightly, precautions which
had not for a long period been adopted, such perfect peace and
tranquillity had ever existed in the neighborhood of the society,
but which he now justified by admitting his strong suspicion
that the Indians had in reality discovered some signs or tracks
which told them of peril at hand, although they did not choose
to disclose the sources of information.

A certain restless and uneasy feeling had circulated therefore
among the order, which really would seem often to be the
harbinger and precursor of great events. The gates were
secured regularly, and watches planted and relieved at sunset,
and throughout the hours of darkness. The brothers slept
with weapons and ammunition ready to their hands, and never
went out even to work in the fields without arms slung at their
backs; and yet, well entrenched, well supplied with provisions
and water, for there was a well within the precinets of the

fort, well armed, well garrisoned, and, above all, provided with
artillery, which the Indians held in great awe, they had little
apprehension and less doubt of beating off any attack, should
one be made; the more so that the season was so late that
it would scarcely be possible for an enemy to keep the field
after another month.

After some days of this wild suspense, on a dark and stormy
night in the early part of November, not very long after the
gates had been closed, all the dogs of the garrison began to
bay fiercely, and then to howl most lugubriously, although
there was no moon to excite them, nor any sounds that reached
the ears of the sentinels. Not long afterward, however, a
dripping sound, as if from a paddle incautiously and rapidly
wielded, was heard from the river, and was immediately succeeded
by a yell so startling and long-drawn, that all who
heard it were assured at the instant, that some tidings of
strange import were at hand; and in less time than it takes to
describe it, the whole community was mustered and under
arms, in expectation of I know not what terrible and disastrous
tidings. Within a minute or two such a burst was heard
from the Indian camp of savage cries and whoops, that it was
very certain that something of note had occurred. In a moment
the whole village was afoot, fire-brands were gleaming
in all directions, and it was soon apparent that the Indians
were striking their tents, and dismantling their more permanent
abodes of all their valuables, which they were hastily embarking
on board their canoes as if by one consent. A minute
or two afterward a light was seen crossing the river, the splash
of paddles was heard, and four or five well-known Indians,
all chiefs of rank, came up the walk to the palisades, with
light-wood brands and weapons in their hands, asking immediate
entrance. “Bald-Eagle come,” said the principle speaker.

“Bring heap news, let in quick, I tell you, not very much time
to lose.”

The gates were thrown open quickly, and certainly there
stood the Bald-Eagle, and in very different plight from that in
which he had set forth. He was unarmed all but his knife,
and the lock and barrel of his broken carbine. His hair was
clotted with blood which had flowed from two or three gashes
in his head, and blood was oozing from two or three rents in
his buckskin hunting-shirt; he looked fagged, too, and wayworn,
but he did not seem broken or disheartened. His story
was brief, but alarming. Returning from a successful hunt
down the north shores of the lake, which he had coasted so
far down as to where Sarnia now stands at the commencement
of the river St. Clair, when within fifteen miles of home, loaded
with peltry, he had been surprised, when expecting nothing
less, by a party of Ojibwas, out upon a war-path, as he knew
from their being in their war-paint, and was taken without resistance,
for to resist such numbers would have been in vain,
since they numbered, he said, no less than thirty war-canoes,
with not less than eight or ten warriors to each, and he estimated
their force at not much less than three hundred men,
well-armed, at least two thirds of them carrying muskets of
English manufacture. Their very numbers, he added, had
rendered them careless, and he had contrived to make his
escape, though not without a sharp struggle with an out-lying
party, and had come on with all speed to warn the good fathers
of the coming peril, and to bring them his arm to aid in the
strife. The enemy would be upon them, he added, early in
the morning, and he advised the mustering of the whole tribe
within the fort, where he was confident that they could easily
repulse the enemy, and hold them at bay until such time as
cold and want should compel them to decamp. He further
recommended the sending out of the sacramental-plate under

the care of some trusty person, who should bury it on some
of the islands, and conceal himself anywhere he best might
on the northwestern shore, or up the river Severn, as it was
certain that the Ojibwas would trust themselves no farther to
the northward at this season, and as they were only actuated
in their attack by the desire of gaining that rich booty.

6. CHAPTER VI.
THE MASSACRE.

While the Bald-Eagle was speaking, Father Borromeè never
withdrew his searching eyes for one instant from his face, and
when he had ended he subjected him to a close cross-examination,
for he very grievously suspected him, but he succeeded
in eliciting nothing, and it was not to be doubted that an enemy
was at hand, since he could have no possible object in the
invention of a falsehood which must be discovered within a
few hours. By this time, the whole tribe of the Iroquois were
at the gates imploring admittance for themselves, their children,
their wives, and their baggage, and as the good faith of
the tribe in general was not to be doubted any more than the fact
that they were engaged in deadly hostilities with the Ojibwas,
they were of course instantly admitted, the women and children
as guests, and in some degree as hostages, the men as
trusty and valorous allies.

The father Borromeè took advantage of this diversion to
dismiss the chiefs under the care of the refectioner and the
brother who acted as chirurgeon, desiring the latter in the Iroquois
tongue to attend carefully to the hurts of the Bald-Eagle,
and adding a few words in Spanish directing him to delay his

operations as much as possible, and by no means to permit
him to get abroad within an hour. When they were once
gone he proceeded to take counsel with the president, and
though he did not hesitate to express his belief that the Bald-Eagle
was a traitor, and in collusion with the enemy, and that
the advice given was for his own advantage, he still believed
it the best to be taken. “Doubtless, he expected,” the Jesuit
said, “to be employed himself in the matter, in which case he
would have at once given the spoil up to the Ojibwas, and
after disclosing to them our line of defence, betrayed us by
some cunning treason. But we will frustrate him,” he added.
“If you will suffer me to go forth, father, on this mission, I
will take with me only the `Little Bear,' whom I know for a
trusty and faithful Indian, and the girl Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng,
who can converse with me in Italian, and by
whom I may communicate with the Ojibwas if need be. The
plate and treasures I will bury below the water-mark on the
east end of the giant's grave, on a due east line from the largest
pine I can find, and a white stone which I will set up on the
shore. So shall you find it if aught of evil befall me. If God
grant me to return in life, I will enter by the secret passage
into the stone-tower to-morrow night at half an hour before
moon-rise; so that three or four of the trustiest of the brothers
to hold the door in hand and admit me at the signal. For the
rest, resist stoutly, put no trust in the Bald-Eagle, let him not
stir a yard without one of the brethren at his elbow, and shoot
him dead on the instant if he attempt to communicate with the
enemy, or do aught savoring in the least of treason. By God's
grace, we will frustrate this knave's treachery, until by means
of the maiden we may make firm peace with the enemy,
which I by no means despair of. Now give me thy blessing,
father, and speed me on my way, for by Heaven's aid, right
sure am I that this will be the better way.”

Some little opposition was made, on the pretended score of
unwillingness to expose so eminent and valuable a life to such
cruel risk, but in reality, because, knowing him to be the best,
the bravest, and the ablest leader of the whole order, they
wanted his presence within so sorely that they held themselves
barely able to dispense with it. His urgency, however, and
the necessity of the case prevailed, and he received the permission
he required, and the persons he had selected as his
companions. To the girl alone was the object of their expedition
intrusted, and she was appointed the bearer, with the
Jesuit's aid, of the coffer in which the relies and plate of the
order were secured. The young chief was content to follow
a leader whom he loved and revered so deeply as the father
Borromee, in blind obedience to his will, without inquiring
wherefore or whither, and had he doubted, the present which
he received before setting forth of a beautifully-finished Spanish-barrelled
carabine, with horn and pouch to correspond, and
a fine German hunting-knife with a buck-horn hilt, would have
hired him to follow any leader even to the gates of the tomb.

The Jesuit himself laid aside his robes, and appeared clad
from head to foot in a suit of fine buckskin accurately fitting
his fine form, and displaying a port and stature certainly better
fitted for a warrior than for a monk, to its best advantage. His
arms were superb, and by the way he handled them it was
clear that he well knew how to use them. They consisted of
a long Spanish-barrelled gun, with the newly-invented wheel-lock,
two brace of ten-inch German pistols, a curved yataghan
of Damascus steel swinging on his left thigh, a stout Toledo
dagger in his belt, and an axe swung by the belt which supported
the horn and bullet-pouch across his shoulders. Even
Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, proud to be selected from
all her tribe for such a duty, carried her bow and quiver, and
thus equipped, bearing the heavy coffer between them, they

issued from a secret wicket in the back of the palisades,
opening upon the brook and ravine, along the course of which
they crept stealthily to its outlet into the river, whither the
girl soon paddled down a canoe from the wharf, unseen and
unsuspected, when they all embarked and dropped so silently
down the current, that they had been gone an hour before their
departure was discovered by any one, and then it was only detected
on the Bald-Eagle's coming forth from the refectory,
when he perceived the absence of the Little-Bear, and soon
after found that the father Borromeè was not to be seen that
evening, whence he at once suspected what had occurred,
though even then he overlooked the departure of the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind,
whom he believed to be somewhere within
the buildings of the Mission. His first impulse was to
leave the fort and follow on their trail, but egress being peremptorily
refused to him, he saw at once that he was himself
suspected, and resigned himself with Indian stoicism to
what he knew must be, exulting inwardly in the sure triumph
of his iniquitous and treasonable schemes.

Before they had been missed within the fort, their canoe
had passed the mouth of the river, and entered the labyrinth of
shoals and shallows, overgrown with a luxuriant crop of wild-rice,
rising to a height of at least six feet above the surface,
and intersected with many narrow navigable channels, which
are one of the peculiar features of the streams which debouch
into the lower end of the great Georgian bay. Here their
peril may be said to have commenced fairly, for from this
point onward they might at any moment fall upon the fleet of
their enemies, but they had concluded, and as it fell out, concluded
wisely, that the Ojibwas being in such overwhelming
force, would scarcely hurry or attempt any forced surprise,
when they were assured, as the Jesuit never doubted that they
were assured, of treacherous aid from within the fort. He

judged, therefore, that they would encamp for the night, on
the western side of some of the many islets where their fires
would not be visible at the mouth of the Wye. He caused his
boat on this principle to be kept away into a deep bight of the
mainland on the left of the mouth of the river as you come
down, and running close along the coast within the shadows
of shore, until he reached and doubled a bold headland opening
a deep bay indenting the land to the southward, from
which point of view he soon discovered no less than five
watch-fires, burning on the southwestern point of what is now
known as Present island, and by the aid of a small perspective-glass,
which he had brought with him, easily discerned the figures
of many savages moving and sitting around the blaze, and
interposing their dusky forms between his eye and the light.

His plan was now taken on the instant, or rather was decided,
for it was that on which he had from the first determined;
paddling as rapidly as he could into the deep bay, he
soon reached the rice-swamp which filled the bottom along the
shores, and after a little examination, struck the mouth of a
deep, narrow, sluggish stream which fell into it; up this with
some labor they forced the canoe, until they reached the land,
which was overspread with a gigantic forest of tall hemlocks,
mingled with deciduous trees, and traversed by an Indian trace,
for there was a portage hence to the neighboring bay, now the
harbor of Penetanguishine, by which several miles of distance
can be saved in rounding the northern headland and working
their way southwardly. Here the canoe was taken out of
water, and the Indian balancing it easily upon his shoulder,
walked off through the woods at his usual swinging trot, followed
by the priest, who, besides being encumbered with his
own arms and those of the Indian, was almost overloaded with
the ponderous coffer, and by the girl, who bore the paddles, a
shovel or two which had been brought along in the canoe.

Abour half an hour's walking brought them to the farther end
of the portage, upon the narrow and limpid basin of Penetanguishine,
now the site of a flourishing village, with British
barracks and a naval station, but then the desolate and unfrequented
wilderness.

Here they lighted a small fire, in a deep hollow, surrounded
with underwood, which sheltered them entirely from view, and
eating a scanty meal of cooked provisions which they had
brought along with them, wrapped themselves in their blankets
and slept, or seemed to sleep through the night unmolested.
But the Jesuit slept not, but lay pondering on the perils of his
comrades, now almost fearing that his advice had not been the
wisest, and that their true policy would have been to have deserted
the fort for the moment after caching their valuables, and
to have run up northwardly along the shores, where the Ojibwas
would not dare to follow them. It was, however, obviously
too late to repent, and though he could not sleep, he lay
and rested himself until the stars paled in the sky to the eastward,
and a faint dappling of the heavens announced the coming
of another day. Then he arose, and bidding his companions
prepare the canoe and get everything aboard, while he
himself hurried back to the other end of the portage to take one
final observation of the Indians, and when there he perceived
them, as he expected, with their barks already afloat and steering
directly across the bay for the embouchure of the Wye, a
fact which confirmed him fully of the treason of the Bald-Eagle,
since but for his information, it was impossible that the
strange savages could have so speedily discovered the mouth
of the river they sought. Filled with grievous and sad forebodings
he now hastened back to his companions, and telling
them nothing of his fears, for he was resolved at all risks after
burying the treasure to return to his brethren, and if necessary
die with them, and feared some opposition from the Little-Bear,

entered the birch canoe, steered down the placid inlet of Peneetanguishine,
and thence re-entering the main waters of the
great Georgian bay, laid her course to the south-westward for
the truncated cone, shaped much like a steeple-crowned hat,
of the puritanic form, which was then and is to this day known
as the Giant's Grave. This conspicuous islet they reached long
before noon, and mooring the canoe to a paddle driven into the
extremity of a gravelly shoal at the eastern end of the island,
they laid aside their arms, and taking the shovels, the coffer,
and a white bowlder-stone which they had brought with them
from the last landing-place, and ascertaining the exact place
designated by the Jesuit, soon effected the concealment of the
treasure, beneath the gravel and beneath the water itself, and
that done, carefully and effectually removing all traces of their
temporary visit to the island mound, they betook themselves
homeward by the same way that they had come, reached the
shelter of the woods of Penetanguishine at an early hour of
the afternoon, and there reposed and finished their small stock
of provisions, until the gathering gloom of evening should render
it safe for them to return safely to the camp, and seek to
re-enter it. In those short days evening soon came, and it
had hardly spread its dark mantle over the earth, calling the
nocturnal tribes of birds and insects into life and motion, before
they were again upon the waters, steering toward the well-known
mouth of the familiar river.

One thing, however, had greatly shaken the confidence of the
priest; for some hours of the time during which they had lain
perdu in the woods nigh to Penetanguishine, the roar of the
artillery from the fort had been almost continuous, telling of a
sharp attack and stout resistance, and at times even the rolling
rattle of the volleyed musketry had been distinctly audible.
On a sudden the roar and rattle had sunk at once, and all was
hushed and still — alas, his foreboding heart! — was hushed

and still for ever — all save the groans of agony, all save the
yells of the frantic torturers, all save the booming of the terrible
death-drums, and the appalling cadences of the scalp-whoop
and the death-halloo. By the time the moon was within a
little space of rising, the priest had landed on the northern
headland of the Wye, obedient to his promise, and after dismissing
the Indian, and bidding him look to his own safety for
he feared the worst was already over, he took his way accompanied
by the girl, who refused to leave him, maintaining that
she was in no danger from her own tribesmen, to the familiar
fort through the lone woodlands.

When he reached the spot, his worst fears were indeed realized.
The mouth of the secret passage was forced violently
open, and it was evident that through it, detected of course by
the Bald-Eagle before his departure, the entrance of the enemies
had been affected. A few steps more brought him to a
full view of the hideous scene of massacre and torture, but the
last act save one of the dread tragedy was completed. The
last save one of the brethren had sealed the testimony of his
faith with his innocent and pious blood; a scathed pile and a
heap of ashes, interspersed with a few human bones, were the
sole monuments of their dreadful doom; and long stood there
erect and grisly, mute evidences of the spot where the Jesuits
endured all the protracted horrors of the Indian torture, and
died invoking not vengeance, but peace and pardon on their
persecutors.

“Domine nunc dimittis,” groaned the Jesuit, as he looked
on the dreadful sight. “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant to
depart in peace;” and with a loud, clear voice he exclaimed,
“Fratres benedicite,” his wonted salutation to his tribes-men,
and strode forward with uplifted arms from the shadows of the
forest into the open area, which was still lighted by the embers
of the death-fires, around which the Indians were sitting,

wearied and worn out with the exhaustion of the past excitement.
At this strange apparition many of them started to their
feet in wonder nigh akin to fear. But the Bald-Eagle recognised
him at once, and leaping forward with a wild whoop of
triumph, seized him unresisting by the collar and dragged him
rudely forward. “This is the chief,” he cried, “this is
the chief-medicine — the evil-spirit of them all. Away with
him, brothers, to the stake. He is the seducer, too, of your
tribes woman, Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng. To the stake
with him.”

But as he spoke the girl herself glided forward and stood at
his elbow.

“It is a lie,” she said. “It is a lie of the Iroquois. The
daughter of Chingwauk, the sister of Chingwaukonce, is no
castaway — never seduced. It is a lie, cowardly Huron Buzzard,
Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng is white as the snow in
winter. That for your lie, foul traitor Huron!” and as she
spoke, she plunged a small knife at a single blow into the heart
of the traitor, that he dropped dead at her feet without a word
or sign. Then she flung the bloody knife into the circle, and
cried in her clear silver tones. “Blood for the honor of the
Ojibwa girl. Death to the liar and the traitor. Father, brother,
has the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind done well?”

A loud acclamation carried an assent to her words, and she
was instantly greeted by the kinsmen, and installed in her lost
station, as the daughter of the great chief, worthy of all distinction
and respect; but no prayers, no arguments, no entreaties
of hers could win the pardon of the Jesuit. He was tortured
so felly, that the very manner of his death has come
down to these days by direct oral tradition of the perpetrators.
Necklaces of red-hot axe-heads were hung about his neck, girdles
about his loins, till when his body was literally well nigh
burnt in twain, his living heart was ripped out of his bosom,

and flung palpitating in his face, while his agonized lips still
quivered with the last notes of the “De Profundis clamavi.”
He died in his middle age, a true and undaunted soldier of the
church; as he had battled in his youth true and undaunted
soldier of his king. His race was run, his duty done. Honor
to his memory, peace to his ashes!

From that day never more did the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind
lift her gentle head, but faded like a flower withered by the
fierce noonday sun. Like Iago, word she never spoke more,
but wandered mute and almost bereaved of reason around the
pile at which her teacher, her friend, and her savior, had died
in anguish intolerable, yet endured with the triumphant faith
and fortitude of a Christian martyr, and a French cavalier, until
death relieved her, too, of the burthen and the weariness of too
long life.

On the following day the Little-Bear was captured and slain,
and with him perished the secret of the concealed treasures.
They are sought for often by both the Indians and the whites,
but never have been found, nor is it probable ever will be, since
the sole record of them exists in this veracious legend, and
even so the bowlder has been swept away, the pine-tree has
perished with age, and the place of the interment may be held
lost for ever.

Before the springtime returned with its flowers, the “Reed-shaken-by-the-wind”
slept by the banks of that fair river which
had so long afforded her a happy home among the good French
Jesuits. Myself, I have sat oftentimes on the low mound
which marks her resting-place, and have fancied as I heard
the wild wind mournfully rustling through the wild-rice beds,
that it murmured the soft accents of her name — Ahsahgunushk
Numamahtahseng.

The race of the Iroquois has vanished from the earth, their
memory preserved alone by the pits which contain their bones

scattered through the wild woods. Their language is no more
heard in their old places, for the Ojibwas dwell where they
dwelt of yore, and all that remains to give evidence concerning
the fall of the old French fort, is this humble record, and the
holy Christian creed which they professed, and which in after-days
their very murderers adopted. Magna est veritas et
prævalebit.

The life of man is grass, and is cut down in a day and perisheth
before the evening star; the Truth of God is eternal,
and endureth for ever and ever.