your weak woman's nature
compels you to be."

Accordingly, with this encouraging permission, Mary began her story,
which she called

Orikama, or the White Water-Lily:

AN INDIAN TALE.

Nearly a hundred years ago, when the greater part of Pennsylvania was
still covered with forests, and was peopled chiefly by wild deer and yet
wilder Indians, there might have been seen, upon the banks of the
beautiful Susquehanna, a log cottage of very pretty appearance. It
consisted of two stories, and was surrounded by a piazza, whose pillars,
trunks of trees unstripped of their bark, were encircled by a luxuriant
growth of ivies and honeysuckles, which ran up to the roof, and hung
down in graceful festoons. The house was situated so as to command the
finest prospect of the river and the distant hills, and gave the
traveller the impression that it was erected by people of more
refinement than the common settlers of that region, rough backwoodsmen,
who thought of little else than the very necessary work of subduing the
wild, planting corn and potatoes, and shooting bears and deer. And so it
was: James Buckingham, who with his young wife had settled there, having
purchased land in that vicinity, was a man accustomed to a more polished
state of society, and had received a college education in New England.
But having become deeply attached to a young girl whose parents refused
consent to their union, the impetuosity of his character prevailed over
his sense of filial piety, and he persuaded the beautiful Ellen
Farmington to leave her home and duty, and to give him a husband's right
to protect her. In all probability, patience and submission might have
prevailed upon her parents to give up an opposition, which was in
reality unreasonable and groundless, as Buckingham was a young man in
every way calculated to make their daughter happy; but this rash act of
youthful folly had embittered their feelings, and the young couple were
forbidden ever to show their faces in the old homestead, lest a parent's
curse should light upon their heads. Too proud to show any repentance,
even if he felt it, James Buckingham determined to settle in another
State, where nothing should recall the past, and where his small amount
of capital, and large stock of energy and industry, might be employed to
advantage; accordingly, he fixed his lot among the pioneers of Penn's
colony, and chose a romantic situation upon the Susquehanna for his
dwelling.

Very t