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By Root 1345 0

her body, inflicting an injury that was known at a glance to be mortal. How this wound was received, no one knew; it was probably one of those casualties that ever accompany scenes like that related in the previous chapter. The Sumach, all the elderly women, and some of the Huron girls, had fallen by the bayonet; either in the confusion of the mêlée, or from the difficulty of distinguishing the sexes, where the dress was so simple. Much the greater portion of the warriors suffered on the spot. A few had escaped, however, and two or three had been taken unharmed. As for the wounded, the bayonet saved the surgeon much trouble. Rivenoak had escaped with life and limb; but was injured and a prisoner. As Captain Warley and his ensign went into the ark, they passed him, seated in dignified silence, in one end of the scow, his head and leg bound, but betraying no visible signs of despondency or despair. That he mourned the loss of his tribe, is certain ; still, he did it in a manner that best became a warrior and a chief.

The two soldiers found their surgeon in the principal room of the ark. He was just quitting the pallet of Hetty, with an expression of sorrowful regret on his hard, pockmarked, Scottish features, that it was not usual to see there. All his assiduity had been useless, and he was compelled reluctantly to abandon the expectation of seeing the girl survive many hours. Dr. Graham was accustomed to deathbed scenes, and ordinarily they produced but little impression on him. In all that relates to religion, his was one of those minds which, in consequence of reasoning much on material things, logically and consecutively, and overlooking the total want of premises which such a theory must ever possess, through its want of a primary agent, had become skeptical; leaving a vague opinion concerning the origin of things, that with high pretensions to philosophy, failed in the first of all philosophical principles, a cause. To him religious dependence appeared a weakness; but when he found one gentle and young like Hetty, with a mind beneath the level of her race, sustained at such a moment by these pious sentiments, and that, too, in a way that many a sturdy warrior and reputed hero might have looked upon with envy, he found himself affected by the sight, to a degree that he would have been ashamed to confess. Edinburgh and Aberdeen, then as now, supplied no small portion of the medical men of the British service; and Dr. Graham, as indeed his name and countenance equally indicated, was, by birth, a North Briton.

“Here is an extraordinary exhibition for a forest, and one but half-gifted with reason,” he observed, with a decided Scotch accent, as Warley and the ensign entered; “I just hope, gentlemen, that when we three shall be called on to quit the 20th—we may be found as resigned to go on the half-pay of another existence as this poor demented chiel!”

“Is there no hope that she can survive the hurt?” demanded Warley, turning his eyes towards the pallid Judith, on whose cheeks, however, two large spots of red had settled as soon as he came into the cabin.

“No more than there is for Chairlie Stuart. Approach and judge for yourselves, gentlemen; ye’ll see faith exemplified in an exceeding and wonderful manner. There is a sort of arbitrium between life and death, in actual conflict in the poor girl’s mind, that renders her an interesting study to a philosopher. Mr. Thornton, I’m at your service now; we can just look at the arm, in the next room, while we speculate as much as we please on the operations and sinuosities of the human mind.”

The surgeon and ensign retired, and Warley had an opportunity of looking about him more at leisure, and with a better understanding of the nature and feelings of the group collected in the cabin. Poor Hetty had been placed on her own simple bed, and was reclining in a half-seated attitude, with the approaches of death on her countenance, though they were singularly dimmed by the luster of an expression, in which all the intelligence of her entire being appeared to be concentrated. Judith