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faithful fellow had orders to return, after delivering it, and on procuring what intelligence he could of the family, to wait his master, at a little inn, about five miles distant from Sir Thomas Sindall's. The first part of his business the reader has seen him accomplish; as to the rest, he was only able to learn something, confusedly, of the Baronet's attachment to Miss Lucy. He expected to have seen that young lady again on the day following that of their first interview; but her attention had been so much occupied by the discoveries related in the two last chapters, and contriving the means of avoiding the danger with which she was threatened, that her promise to the bearer of Mr Bolton's letter had escaped her memory. He set out, therefore, for the place of appointment on the evening of that day, and reached it but a very short time before his master arrived.

Bolton, having learned what particulars Jerry could inform him of, desired him to return in the morning to his work in Sir Thomas's garden, and remain there till he should receive farther orders; then, leaving his horses and servants for fear of discovery, he set out on foot, in the garb of a peasant, which Jerry had found means to procure him.

As he had passed several years of his life at Bilswood, he trusted implicitly to his own knowledge of the way; but soon after his leaving the inn the moon was totally darkened, and it rained with such violence, accompanied with incessant peals of thunder, that, in the confusion of the scene, he missed his path, and had wandered a great way over the adjacent common before he discovered his mistake. When he endeavoured to regain the road, he found himself entangled in a very thick brake of furze, which happened to lie on that side whence he had turned; and, after several fruitless efforts to make his way through it, he was obliged to desist from the attempt, and tread back the steps he had made, till he returned to the open part of the heath. Here he stood, uncertain what course to take; when he observed at a distance the twinkling of a light, which immediately determined him. On advancing somewhat nearer, he found a little winding track that seemed to point towards the place; and after following it some time, he could discern an object which he took for the house to which it led.

The lightning, which now flashed around him, discovered on each hand the earth raised into mounds that seemed graves of the dead, and here and there a bone lay mouldering on the walk he trod. A few paces farther, through a narrow Gothic door, gleamed a light, which faintly illuminated a length of vault within. To this Bolton approached, not without some degree of fear; when he perceived at the farther end a person, in a military uniform, sitting by a fire he had made of some withered brushwood piled up against the wall. As Harry ap

proached him, the echo of the place doubled the hollow sound of his feet." Who is there?" cried the stranger, turning at the noise, and half unsheathing a hanger which he wore at his side. "A friend," replied Harry, bowing, "who takes the liberty of begging a seat by your fire.""Your manner," said the other, "belies your garb; but whoever you are, you are welcome to what shelter this roof can afford, and what warmth my fire can give. We are, for the time, joint lords of the mansion, for my title is no other than the inclemency of the night. It is such a one as makes even this gloomy shelter enviable; and that broken piece of mattock, and this flint, are precious, because they lighted some bits of dry straw, to kindle the flame that warms us. By the moss-grown altar, and the frequent figures of the cross, I suppose these are the remains of some chapel devoted to ancient veneration. Sit down on this stone, if you please, sir, and our offering shall be a thankful heart over some humble fare which my knapsack contains." As he spoke, he pulled out a loaf of coarse bread, a piece of cheese, and a bottle of ale. Bolton expressed his thanks for the invitation, and partook of the repast. "I fear, sir," said his companion, "you will sup poorly; but I have known what it is to want even a crust of bread.-You look at me with surprise; but, though I am poor, I am honest.”—“ Pardon me," answered Harry, "I entertain no suspicion; there is something that speaks for you in this bosom, and answers for your worth. It may be in my power to prevent, for the future, those hardships, which, I fear, you have formerly endured." The soldier held forth the bit of bread which he was putting to his mouth. "He, to whom this fare is luxury, can scarcely be dependent; yet my gratitude to you, sir, is equally due;-if I have felt misfortune, I have deserved it."-He sighed, and Harry answered him with a sigh.—“ I see a sort of question in your face, sir; and I know not why it is, there are some faces I cannot easily resist. If my story outlasts the storm, it will take from the irksomeness of its duration."

CHAP. XVIII.

The Stranger relates the History of his Life.

"It is now upwards of twenty years since I left my native country. You are too young, sir, to have gained much knowledge of mankind; let me warn you, from sad experience, to beware of those passions which at your age I was unable to resist, and which, in the commerce of the world, will find abundant occasion to overcome incautious and inexperienced youth. Start not when I tell you, that you see before you one, whom the laws of his country had doomed to expiate his crimes by death, though, from the

mercy of his prince, that judgment was mitigated into a term of transportation, some time ago elapsed. This punishment I incurred from the commission of a robbery, to which some particular circumstances, joined to the poverty consequent on dissipation and extravagance, had tempted me.

tisfaction by fighting me. But this, from the opinion conceived of my strength and ferocity, he did not chuse to accept; on which I gave him 80 severe a drubbing, that he was unable to mount guard in his turn, and the surgeon reported that his life was in danger. For this offence I was tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to reThe master to whom my service was ad- ceive five hundred lashes as a punishment. judged in the West Indies, happened to die soon. When their sentence was communicated to me, after my arrival there. I got my freedom, there- I petitioned that it might be changed into death; fore, though it was but to change it for a ser- but my request was refused. That very day, vice as severe as my former: I was enlisted in therefore, I received one hundred lashes, (for the a regiment then stationed in the island, and, sentence was to be executed at different periods,) being considered as a felon, unworthy of any and next morning was to suffer as many more. mild treatment, was constantly exposed to every The remainder, however, I resolved, if possible, hardship which the strictest duty, or the most to escape by an act of suicide. This I was only continual exposure to the dangers of the cli- prevented from putting in execution by the mate, could inflict. Had I revealed my story, want of opportunity; as I had been stripped of and taken advantage of that distinction which every the smallest weapon of offence, and was my birth and education would have made be- bound with ropes to one of the posts of my bed. tween the other convicts and me, it is probable I contrived, nevertheless, about midnight, to I might have prevented most of the evils both reach the fire-place with my feet, and having of my former and present situation; but I set drawn out thence a live ember, disposed it im out, from the first, with a fixed determination, mediately under the most combustible part of suffering every part of my punishment, which the bed. It had very soon the effect I desired; the law allots to the meanest and most un- the room was set on fire, and I regained my friended. All the severities, therefore, which liberty, by the ropes, with which I was tied, were now imposed upon me, I bore without being burnt. At that moment the desire of life repining; and, from an excellent natural conwas rekindled by the possibility of escaping; stitution, was not only able to overcome them, the flames bursting out fiercely at one side of but they served to render me still more patient the house where I lay, the attention of the solof fatigue, and less susceptible of impression diers, whom the fire had awaked, was princifrom the vicissitudes of the weather; and from pally turned to that quarter, and I had an opa sullen disregard of life, with which the re- portunity of stealing off unperceived at the opmembrance of better days inspired me, my soul posite side. We were then in a sort of wooden became as fearless as my body robust. These huts which had been built for our accommodaqualities made me be taken notice of by some tion on the outside of one of our frontier forts; of the officers in the regiment, and afterwards, so that, when I had run two or three hundred when it was ordered to America, and went on yards, I found myself in the shelter of a wood, some Indian expeditions, were still more ser- pretty secure from pursuit; but, as there it was viceable, and more attractive of observation. impossible for me long to subsist, and I had no By these means I began to obliterate the dis- chance of escaping detection if I ventured to grace which my situation at enlisting had fixed approach the habitations of any of my countryupon me; and, if still regarded as a ruffian, I men, I had formed the resolution of endeavourwas at least acknowledged to be a useful one. ing to join the Indians, whose scouting parties Not long after, on occasion of a piece of service I I had frequently seen at a small distance from performed for an officer on an advanced guard, our out-posts. I held therefore in a direction that was attacked by a party of hostile Indians, which I judged the most probable for falling in I was promoted to a halberd. The stigma, how with them, and a very little after day-break disever, of my transportation was not yet entirely covered a party, seated after the manner of their forgotten, and by some it was the better re- country, in a ring, with the ashes of their newlymembered, because of my present advancement. extinguished fire in the middle. I advanced One of those, with whom I had never been on good slowly to the place, which I had almost reached terms, was particularly offended at being combefore I was perceived. When they discovered manded, as he termed it, by a jail-bird; and me, they leaped up on their feet, and, seizing one day, when I was on guard, had drawn on their arms, screamed out the war-whoop, toalarm the back of my coat, the picture of a gallows, the different small parties who had passed the on which was hung a figure in caricature, with night in resting-places near them. One of them, the initials of my name written over it. This presenting his piece, took aim at me; but I fell was an affront too gross to be tamely put up on my knees, shewed them my defenceless state, with; having sought out the man, who did not and held out my hands, as if imploring their deny the charge, I challenged him to give me sa- mercy and protection. Upon this, one of the

oldest among them made a sign to the rest, and advancing towards me, asked me in broken French, mixed with his own language, of which too I understood something, what was my intention, and whence I came? I answered as distinctly as I could to these interrogatories; and shewing the sores on my back, which I gave him to understand had been inflicted at the fort, made protestations, both by imperfect language and significant gestures, of my friendship to his countrymen, and hatred to my own. After holding a moment's conversation with the rest, he took my hand, and, leading me a little forward, placed me in the midst of the party. Some of them examined me attentively, and, upon some farther discourse together, brought the baggage, with which two prisoners, lately made from some adverse tribe, had been loaded, and laid it upon me. This burden, which to any man would have been oppressively heavy, you may believe, was much more intolerable to me, whose flesh was yet raw from the lashes I had received; but as I knew that fortitude was an indispensable virtue with the Indians, I bore it without wincing, and we proceeded on the route which the party I had joined were destined to pursue. During the course of our first day's march, they often looked stedfastly in my face, to discover if I shewed any signs of uneasiness. When they saw that I did not, they lightened my load by degrees, and at last, the senior chief, who had first taken notice of me, freed me from it altogether, and, at the same time, chewing some herbs he found in the wood, applied them to my sores, which in a few days were almost entirely healed. I was then entrusted with a tomahawk, and shortly after with a gun, to the dexterous use of both which weapons I was frequently exercised by the young men of our party, during the remainder of our expedition. It lasted some months, in which time I had also become tolerably acquainted with their language. At the end of this excursion, in which they warred on some other Indian nations, they returned to their own country, and were received with all the barbarous demonstrations of joy peculiar to that people. In a day or two after their arrival, their prisoners were brought forth into a large plain, where the kindred of those who had been slain by the nations to which the captives belonged, assembled to see them. Each singled out his expiatory prisoner, and, having taken him home to his hut, such as chose that kind of satisfaction adopted them in place of the relations they had lost; with the rest they returned to their for mer place of meeting, and began to celebrate the festival of their revenge. You can hardly conceive a species of inventive cruelty, which they did not inflict on the wretches whom fortune had thus put into their power; during the course of which, not a groan escaped from the sufferers; but while the use of their voices re

mained, they sung in their rude, yet forcible manner, the glory of their former victories, and the pleasure they had received from the death of their foes; concluding always with the hopes of revenge from the surviving warriors of their nation. Nor was it only for the pleasure of the reflection that they caroled thus the triumphs of the past; for I could observe, that, when at any time the rage of their tormentors seemed to subside, they poured forth those boastful strains in order to rekindle their fury, that intenseness of pain might not be wanting in the trial of their fortitude. I perceived the old man whom I have before mentioned, keep his eye fixed upon me during the solemnity; and frequently, when an extreme degree of torture was borne with that calmness which I have described, he would point, with an expressive look, to him on whom it was inflicted, as if he had desired me to take particular notice of his resolution. I did not then fully comprehend the meaning of this; but I afterwards understood it to have been a preparatory hint of what I myself was to endure; for the next morning, after the last surviving prisoner had expired, I was seized by three or four Indians, who stripped me of what little clothes I had then left, tied me in a horizontal posture between the branches of two large trees they had fixed in the ground, and, after the whole tribe had danced round me to the music of a barbarous howl, they began to re-act upon me nearly the same scene they had been engaged in the day before. After each of a certain select number had stuck his knife into my body, though they carefully avoided any mortal wound, they rubbed it over, bleeding as it was, with gun-powder, the salts of which gave me the most exquisite pain. Nor did the ingenuity of these practised tormentors stop here; they afterwards laid quantities of dry gun-powder on different parts of my body, and set fire to them, by which I was burnt in some places to the bone.-But I see you shudder at the horrid recital; suffice it then to say, that these, and some other such experiments of wanton cruelty, I bore with that patience, with which nothing but a life of hardship, and a certain obduracy of spirit, proceeding from a contempt of existence, could have endowed me.

"After this trial was over, I was loosed from my bonds, and set in the midst of a circle, who shouted the cry of victory; and my aged friend brought me a bowl of water, mixed with some spirits, to drink. He took me then home to his hut, and laid applications of different simples to my mangled body. When I was so well recovered as to be able to walk abroad, he called together certain elders of his tribe, and acknowledging me for his son, gave me a name, and fastened round my neck a belt of wampum. 'It is thus,' said he, that the valiant are tried, and thus are they rewarded; for how shouldst

6

thou be as one of us, if thy soul were as the soul of little men? He only is worthy to lift the hatchet with the Cherokees, to whom shame is more intolerable than the stab of the knife, or the burning of the fire.'

CHAP. XIX.

A continuation of the Stranger's Story.

"In this society I lived till about a year and a half ago; and it may seem extraordinary to declare, yet it is certainly true, that, during the life of the old man who had adopted me, even had there been no legal restraint on my return to my native country, scarce any inducement could have tempted me to leave the nation to which he belonged, except perhaps the desire of revisiting a parent, and a sister, whom I had left in England sunk beneath that ignominy, which the son and the brother had drawn on his guiltless connections. When we consider the perfect freedom subsisting in this rude and simple state of society, where rule is only acknowledged for the purpose of immediate utility to those who obey, and ceases whenever that purpose of subordination is accomplished; where greatness cannot use oppression, nor wealth excite where the desires are native to the envy; heart, and the languor of satiety is unknown; where, if there is no refined sensation of delight, there is also no ideal source of calamity; we shall the less wonder at the inhabitants feeling no regret for the want of those delicate pleasures of which a more polished people is possessed. Certain it is, that I am far from being a single instance of one, who had even attained maturity in Europe, and yet found his mind so accommodated, by the habit of a few years, to Indian manners, as to leave that country with regret. The death of my parent by adoption loosened, indeed, my attachment to it; that event happened a short time before my departure from America.

"The composure with which the old man met his dissolution, would have done honour to the firmest philosopher of antiquity. When he found himself near his end, he called me to him, to deliver some final instructions respecting my carriage to his countrymen; he observed, at the close of his discourse, that I retained so much of the European, as to shed some tears while he delivered it. In those tears,' said he, "there is no wisdom, for there is no use; I have heard that, in your country, men prepare for death, by thinking on it while they live; this also is folly, because it loses the good, by anticipating the evil: we do otherwise, my son, as our fathers have better instructed us, and take from the evil by reflecting on the good. I have lived a thousand moons, without captivity, and without disgrace; in my youth

I did not fly in battle, and in age, the tribes listened while I spake. If I live in another land after death, I shall remember these things with pleasure; if the present is our only life, to have done thus is to have used it well. You have sometimes told me of your countrymen's account of a land of souls; but you were a young man when you came among us, and the cunning among them may have deceived you; for the children of the French king call themselves after the same God that the English do; yet their discourses concerning him cannot be true, because they are opposite one to another. Each says, that God shall burn the others with fire; which could not happen if both were his children. Besides, neither of them act as the sons of Truth, but as the sons of Deceit; they say their God heareth all things, yet do they break the promises which they have called him to hear; but we know that the spirit within us listeneth, and what we have said in its hearing, that we do. If in another country the soul liveth, this witness shall live with it; whom it hath here reproached, it shall there disquiet; whom it hath here honoured, it shall there reward. Live, therefore, my son, as your father hath lived; and die as he dieth, fearless of death.'

upon

"With such sentiments the old man resigned his breath; and I blushed for the life of Christians, while I heard them.

of the community; and my behaviour had been
"I was now become an independent member
such, that I succeeded to the condition of my
father, with the respect of a people amongst
whom honour is attainable only by merit. But
his death had dissolved that tie which grati
tude, and indeed affection for the old man, had
heart;
turally awakened in me the remembrance of a
and the scene of his death na-
father in England, whose age might now be
helpless, and call for the aid of a long-lost son
to solace and support it. This idea, once roused,
became every day more powerful, and at last I
resolved to communicate it to the tribe, and tell
them my purpose of returning home.

on my

66

They heard me without surprise or emotion; as indeed it is their great characteristic turn,' said one of the elders, to a people who not to be easily awakened to either. You resell affection to their brethren for money; take therefore with you some of the commodities which their traders value. Strength, agility, and fortitude, are sufficient to us; but with them they are of little use; and he who possesses wealth having no need of virtue, among wealthy it will not be found. The last your father taught you, and amongst us you practised; the first he had not to leave, nor have we to bestow; but take as many beaverskins as you can carry on your journey, that it may reach that parent whom, you tell us, you go to cherish.'

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"I returned thanks to the old man for his counsel, and to the whole tribe for their kindness; and having, according to his advice, taken few of the furs they offered me, I resumed the tattered remains of the European dress which I had on when I escaped from the fort, and took the nearest road to one of our back-settlements, which I reached, without any accident, by the assistance of an Indian, who had long shewn a particular attachment to me, and who now attended me on my way. Yonder smoke,' said my conductor, rises from the dwellings of your countrymen. You now return to a world which I have heard you describe as full of calamity; but the soul you possess is the soul of a man; remember, that to fortitude there is no sting in adversity, and in death no evil

to the valiant."

6

"When he left me, I stood for some minutes, looking back, on one hand, to the wilds I had passed, and on the other, to the scenes of cultivation which European industry had formed; and it may surprise you to hear, that though there wanted not some rekindling attachment to a people amongst whom my first breath had been drawn, and my youth spent, yet my imagination drew, on this side, fraud, hypocrisy, and sordid baseness; while on that seemed to preside honesty, truth, and savage nobleness of soul.

"When I appeared at the door of one of the houses in the settlement that was nearest me, I was immediately accosted by its master, who, judging from the bundle of furs which I carried, that I had been trading among the Indians, asked me, with much kindness, to take up my lodging with him. Of this offer I was very glad to accept, though I found a scarcity of words to thank my countryman for his favour; as, from want of use, my remembrance of the English language had been so much effaced, as not only to repress fluency, but even to prevent an ordinary command of expression; and I was more especially at a loss for ceremonious phraseology, that department of language being unknown in the country whence I was just returned. My landlord was not a little astonished, when I could at last make shift to inform him of my having passed so many years among the Indians. He asked a thousand questions about customs which never existed, and told me of a multitude of things, of which all the time I had lived in that country, I had never dreamed the possibility. Indeed, from the superiority of his expression, joined to that fund of supposed knowledge which it served to communicate, a bystander would have been led to imagine, that he was describing, to some ignorant guest, a country with whose manners he had been long conversant, and among whose inhabitants he had passed the greatest part of his life. At length, however, his discourse centered upon the fur-trade, and naturally glided from

that to an offer of purchasing my beaver-skins. These things, I was informed by my courteous entertainer, had fallen so much in their price of late, that the traders could hardly defray their journey in procuring them; that himself had lost by some late bargains in that way; but that, to oblige a stranger, the singularity of whose adventures had interested him in his behalf, he would give me the highest price at which he had heard of their being sold for a long time past. This I accepted without hesitation, as I had neither language nor inclination for haggling; and having procured as much money by the bargain as, I imagined, would more than carry me to a seaport, I proceeded on my journey, accompanied by an inhabitant of Williamsburg, who was returned from an annual visit to a settlement on the back-frontiers, which he had purchased in partnership with another, who constantly resided upon it. He seemed to be naturally of an inquisitive disposition; and having learned from my former landlord, that I had lived several years with the Indians, tormented me all the while our journey lasted, with interrogatories concerning their country and manners. But as he was less opinionative of his own knowledge in the matter than my last English acquaintance, I was the more easily prevailed on to satisfy his curiosity, though at the expence of a greater number of words than I could conveniently spare; and, at last, he made himself entirely master of my story, from the time of my leaving the regiment in which I had served, down to the day on which I delivered my recital. When I mentioned my having sold my beaver-skins for a certain sum, he started aside, and then lifting up his eyes in an ejaculatory manner, expressed his astonishment how a Christian could be guilty of such monstrous dishonesty, which, he said, was no better than one would have expected in a Savage; for that my skins were worth at least three times the money. I smiled at his notions of comparative morality, and bore the intelligence with a calmness that seemed to move his admiration. He thanked God that all were not so ready to take advantage of ignorance or misfortune; and, cordially grasping my hand, begged me to make his house at Williamsburg my own, till such time as I could procure my passage to England."

CHAP. XX.

Conclusion of the Stranger's Story.

"PURSUANT to this friendly invitation, I accompanied him to his house on our arrival in that place. For some days my landlord behaved to me in the most friendly manner, and furnished me, of his own accord, with linen and wearing apparel; several articles of which, though necessaries in the polished society of

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