knoll lay a
clear lake, in which swans, white as the lily, were disporting
themselves, and the red-headed, and the green-winged duck, and many
other beautiful feathered creatures. But the most beautiful objects
remain to be painted. These were four tall and slender maidens,
beautiful as the flower-clad trees and blossom-crowned hills of their
own island, and sweet as the breath of a lemon-tree. Their eyes shone
as bright as the beams of the morning sun; bright locks of surpassing
beauty clustered around their lovely brows; and their garments were
woven of many colours as brilliant as the rainbow. Their bosoms
swelled like the heavings of the billows on a little lake, when it is
but slightly stirred by the breezes of spring. Their step--what can be
compared to it? A bird skimming the fields; a wind slightly stirring
the bushes; an antelope bounding over a mountain crag; a deer a little
alarmed at the whoop of the hunter. Beautiful creatures! The Great
Spirit never formed any thing, not even the trees, nor the flowers of
spring, nor the field of ripe grain, nor the sun of whom those four
maidens were sisters, so beautiful as they were.

They came--these four beautiful maidens--to the four bewildered
travellers, whom they addressed thus, and their voice was sweeter than
the music of the song-sparrow--"Who are ye?" The hunters replied that
they were men of the Creek-nation who had ventured into the marsh
Ouaquaphenogan, and were bewildered in its inextricable mazes. Two
days, they said, they had been without food; they were faint and
weary, and demanded refreshments, such as they would have given, had a
hungry traveller come to their door, and said, "Food I have none, give
me or I faint." The beautiful maidens replied, that the men of their
nation, having long ages ago been driven with much bloodshed into the
inaccessible fastnesses of the island Ouaquaphenogan, in the lake of
the same name, by the ancestors of the present generation of Creeks,
had retained so deeply in their bosoms the memory of their wrongs,
that they were sure to inflict upon them most excruciating tortures,
and to make them die a death of fire. Such, they said, would be the
fate of the four bewildered hunters, should their fathers or brothers
discover them now. They earnestly besought them to fly; but first,
with that tender and compassionate nature which belongs to women when
they see the other sex in distress, they brought from a little cabin
which