ose this idea excited the cupidity of the
commandant, for a trapper coming in the winter, whilst I still lay very
ill with fever, Museau consented that I should write home to my mother,
but that the letter should be in French, that he should see it, and
that I should say I was in the hands of the Indians, and should not be
ransomed under ten thousand livres.

"In vain I said I was a prisoner to the troops of his Most Christian
Majesty, that I expected the treatment of a gentleman and an officer.
Museau swore that letter should go, and no other; that if I hesitated,
he would fling me out of the fort, or hand me over to the tender mercies
of his ruffian Indian allies. He would not let the trapper communicate
with me except in his presence. Life and liberty are sweet. I resisted
for a while, but I was pulled down with weakness, and shuddering with
fever; I wrote such a letter as the rascal consented to let pass, and
the trapper went away with my missive, which he promised, in three
weeks, to deliver to my mother in Virginia.

"Three weeks, six, twelve, passed. The messenger never returned. The
winter came and went, and all our little plantations round the fort,
where the French soldiers had cleared corn-ground and planted gardens
and peach- and apple-trees down to the Monongahela, were in full
blossom. Heaven knows how I crept through the weary time! When I was
pretty well, I made drawings of the soldiers of the garrison, and of the
half-breed and her child (Museau's child), and of Museau himself, whom,
I am ashamed to say, I flattered outrageously; and there was an old
guitar left in the fort, and I sang to it, and played on it some French
airs which I knew, and ingratiated myself as best I could with my
gaolers; and so the weary months passed, but the messenger never
returned.

"At last news arrived that he had been shot by some British Indians in
Maryland: so there was an end of my hope of ransom for some months more.
This made Museau very savage and surly towards me; the more so as his
sergeant inflamed his rage by telling him that the Indian woman was
partial to me--as I believe, poor thing, she was. I was always gentle
with her, and grateful to her. My small accomplishments seemed wonders
in her eyes; I was ill and unhappy, too, and these are always claims to
a woman's affection.

"A captive pulled down by malady, a ferocious gaoler, and a young woman
touched by the prisoner's misfortunes--sure you expect that, w