l and
enervating embrace the mighty trunk had perished, still clasped the
magnificent colossus with their shining red tendrils, whilst the
interior of the tree, hollowed by the tooth of time, was of a
fantastical configuration, not unlike a Gothic chapel, and sufficiently
spacious to contain twenty men. The care with which the hollow had been
swept out, and the neighbourhood of a salt spring, showed that it was
used by the Indian hunters as a resting-place and ambush. Canondah
cautiously approached the tree and returned to Rosa with the
intelligence that it was unoccupied. From the branches of a neighbouring
cypress, the two girls now stripped quantities of Spanish moss,
wherewith they speedily composed a soft and luxurious bed in the
interior of the cotton-tree. This done, they rolled blocks of wood and
fragments of trees to the entrance, apparently to form a rampart against
the nocturnal intrusion of bear or panther. These preparations
completed, they returned to the wounded man. Canondah passed her left
arm under his legs, and signed to Rosa to grasp her hand, whilst their
arms should serve as a support to his back. Rosa blushed and hesitated.

"Does the white Rose," said Canondah, "fear to touch her brother, for
whose life she was lately so anxious?"

For sole reply, the young girl took her friend's hand, and raising the
stranger from the ground, they carried him to the hollow tree, and laid
him down upon his mossy couch.

"When the earth is covered with darkness," said Canondah, bending over
him, "Canondah will visit her brother, and pour balsam into his wounds."

But her words were unmarked by the person addressed, who, with the
exception of a faint breathing, gave no sign of life. The two maidens
struck into the path by which they had first approached the river, and
along which we will now precede them in order to introduce the reader
into an entirely new world.

At a short distance from the scene of the adventure above narrated, was
a wide clearing, extending for about three miles along the shore. It had
originally been part of a palmetto field covering the bank of the river
for the breadth of half a mile, at which distance a limit was put to it
by the colossal stems of the aboriginal forest. The clearing had been
made by the burning of the palmettos, in whose place a carpet of
luxuriant grass had sprung up, dotted with groups of magnificent trees,
and intersected by natural hedges of myrtle, mangrove, palm