generally results in demonstrating how much we are prone to exaggerate
in advance the difficulties of any undertaking. Accordingly, Mildred's
present experience strengthened her resolution to proceed, and even
communicated an unexpected increase of contentment to her feelings.

On the fifth day the party crossed the river Dan, and entered the
province of North Carolina. A small remnant of Gates's shattered army
lay at Hillsborough, at no great distance from the frontier; and as
Mildred was anxious to avoid the inquiry or molestation to be expected
in passing through a military post, she resolved to travel by a lower
route, and Horse Shoe, therefore, at her suggestion, directed his
journey towards the little village of Tarborough.

Cornwallis, it was understood, since the battle of Camden, had removed
his head-quarters into the neighborhood of the Waxhaws, some distance up
the Catawba, where he was supposed to be yet stationary. The whole
country in the neighborhood of either army was in a state of earnest
preparation; the British commander recruiting his forces for further and
immediate operations--the American endeavoring to reassemble his feeble
and scattered auxiliaries for defence. At the present moment, actual
hostilities between these two parties were entirely suspended, in
anxious anticipation of the rapidly approaching renewal of the struggle.
It was a breathing time, when the panting combatants, exhausted by
battle, stood sullenly eyeing each other and making ready--the one to
strike, the other to ward off another staggering blow.

The country over which Mildred was now to travel was calculated to tax
her powers of endurance to the utmost. It was a dreary waste of barren
wilderness, covered with an endless forest of gloomy pine, through which
a heavy, sandy road crept in lurid and melancholy shade. Here and there
a miserable hut occurred to view, with a few ragged inmates, surrounded
by all the signs of squalid poverty. The principal population were only
to be seen along the banks of the rivers which penetrated into this
region, some twenty or thirty miles distant from each other. The
alluvial bottoms through which these streams found a channel to the
ocean, were the only tracts of land of sufficient fertility to afford
support to man--all between them was a sterile and gloomy forest.

Still, these regions were not deserted. Bodies of irregular troops, ill
clothed and worse armed, and generally bearing the h