re regarded as altogether the inferiors of their
lords and masters.

To Oriana the arrival of the young mother and her playful child was a
source of much pleasure and comfort; for she had begun to feel the want
of female society, and the women who accompanied Tisquantum's party,
and assisted her in the domestic duties of the family, were no
companions to her. In Mailah she saw that she could find a friend; and
her kindness and sympathy soon attached the lonely young squaw to her,
and even restored her to cheerfulness and activity. It was only when
she visited the grave in which Henrich and Jyanough had laid the
murdered Lincoya, and decked it with flowers and green boughs, that the
widow seemed to feel the greatness of her affliction. Then she would
weep bitterly, and, with passionate gestures, lament her brave warrior.
But, at other times, she was fully occupied with the care of her little
Lincoya, or in assisting Oriana in the light household duties that
devolved upon her. And her sweet voice was often heard singing to the
child, which generally hung at her back, nestled in its soft bed of
moss.

CHAPTER X.

'The noble courser broke away.
And bounded o'er the plain?
The desert echoed to his tread,
As high he toss'd his graceful head,
And shook his flowing name.

King of the Western deserts! Thou
Art still untam'd and free!
Ne'er shall that crest he forced to bow
Beneath the yoke of drudgery low:
But still in freedom shalt thou roam
The boundless fields that form thy home
Thy native Prairie!' ANON.

The camp of the Indian hunters looked cheerful and picturesque, as
Oriana and Mailah approached it one evening on their return from a
ramble in the forest, where they had been to seek the wild fruits that
now abounded there, and paused at the skirt of the wood, to admire the
scene before them. The proposed hunting-ground had been reached the
preceding day, and already the temporary huts were completed, and the
tents of the Sachem pitched beneath a grove of lofty oaks and walnuts,
free from underwood, and on the border of a clear and rippling stream.
The Nausett and Pequodee hunters had purchased a considerable number of
horses from their Cree friends; and, therefore, the journey from
Chingook's village to the prairie, in which the encampment now stood,
had been performed with much ease and expedition; and the hardy animals
were so little fatigued by their march through the forest, that several