of the shadows. Bring
your basket, and you shall gather moss while I dig up my creeper. When
Edith sees its drooping white flowers, she will forgive me for laughing
at her unusual fears.'

Edith said no more. She was sure that Henrich knew best; and she
silently watched him leave the garden, and enter the shade of the thick
forest, accompanied by her joyous little brother. Were her fears,
indeed, the mere creation of her own young fancy I or were they
occasioned by one of those strange and unaccountable presentiments
which have been felt so frequently as to justify the old proverb,

'Coming events cast their shadow, before them.'

Edith sat on the mossy seat that Henrich had formed in her bower. It
looked towards the wood, and the commanding situation which it
occupied, on a rising ground towards the center of the garden, enabled
her to overlook the green fence that enclosed the grounds, and to watch
the receding forms of her brothers, until they were hidden from her
sight by the winding of the path through the underwood. Still she
gazed, and her heart grew sad; and tears, which she could not check,
rolled down her cheeks. Did she again fancy? and did her tearful eyes
now convert the bushes into the figures of two dark Indians, in the
costume of the dreaded Nausetts? Surely those were human forms that
moved so swiftly and so silently from the dark stem of a gigantic oak,
and crossing the forest path, were instantly again concealed. Edith
wiped her glistening eyes. She held her breath, and feared to move;
but the beating of her young heart was audible. No sound met her
listening ear--no movement again was detected by her straining eye--and
she began to think that her own fears had conjured up those terrible
forms.

But what was that distant cry that sounded from the wood in the
direction in which her brothers had gone? And why does she now behold
Ludovico running wildly, and alone, down the path, with terror depicted
in his countenance?

Edith flew to meet him; but ere she reached him, the dreadful truth was
made known to her by his agonized cry.

'O, my brother! my brother! they have taken him, Edith; they are
dragging him away! They will kill him!' he shrieked aloud, as he threw
himself into Edith's arms, almost choked with the violence of his
feelings, and the speed with which he had fled.

What could Edith do? She dared not leave him, to be carried off,
perhaps, by some other prowling savage, who migh