o
this charming maiden, and have heard from her lips a soft confession
of her love for the Muscogulgee. She consents to leave the house of
her father, and the home of her childhood, to go, with the Guard of
the Red Arrows, to the cabin he has built himself beside the beautiful
and rapid river of his nation."

The father answered, "I cannot spare my daughter to go to the far home
of him who asks her hand. She is the light of my eyes, and the joy of
my heart. What would her mother say, and how should I answer the fond
questions which, with eyes streaming with tears, she would ask, if I
permitted the little fawn she has nursed with so much care to go forth
to a distant land--to be in the morning of her youth separated from
all her friends and companions, and taken to a new and unknown abode?
Gloom would be in my cabin, and tears would rush from the eyes, that
for seventeen harvests have been accustomed to see the gentle maiden
performing her acts of dutiful kindness, and gliding with a foot
noiseless as snow around the couches of her beloved parents. We should
listen in the morning for the carol of the sweetest of all birds, and
miss in the evening the tread of the lightest mortal foot that ever
brushed the dew from the flowers of the prairie. There would be one
missing from the repast of meat; one from the dance of maidens beneath
the shady oak; one from the couch of moss where we sleep. No,
Muscogulgee! I cannot spare the fawn. How should I answer the fond
questions of her mother, when, with eyes streaming with tears, she
should ask me for her daughter? When I told her the truth, she would
cry, 'Hard and cruel man! thou hast torn from me the darling of my
heart, the idol of my soul.--What shall become of me--of thee, thus
deprived of our sweet child?' No, Muscogulgee! I must refuse thee my
daughter. And yet, if thou wilt renounce thine own nation, and come
and take up thy residence in the native land of her thou lovest, or
pretendest to love, the maiden shall be thine. Thou shalt have a cabin
built beside my own, and, as is our Indian wont, the friends of thy
bride shall place within it all the household implements needed in our
simple life. Her friends shall be thy friends, and her father thy
father, and her mother thy mother. When there is thunder and darkness
in the sky of the Cherokees, it shall thunder and be dark in the sky
of the Muscogulgee sojourner among them, and with whomsoever the
Cherokees have buried the