e mossgrown
and mouldering trunk of a tree uprooted years before. Her employment,
diversified by an occasional glance at the pot, now beginning to simmer
over the blaze, was the perusal of the current year's Massachusetts
Almanac, which, with the exception of an old black-letter Bible,
comprised all the literary wealth of the family. None pay a greater
regard to arbitrary divisions of time than those who are excluded from
society; and Dorcas mentioned, as if the information were of
importance, that it was now the twelfth of May. Her husband started.

"The twelfth of May! I should remember it well," muttered he, while
many thoughts occasioned a momentary confusion in his mind. "Where am
I? Whither am I wandering? Where did I leave him?"

Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband's wayward moods to note any
peculiarity of demeanor, now laid aside the almanac and addressed him
in that mournful tone which the tender hearted appropriate to griefs
long cold and dead.

"It was near this time of the month, eighteen years ago, that my poor
father left this world for a better. He had a kind arm to hold his head
and a kind voice to cheer him, Reuben, in his last moments; and the
thought of the faithful care you took of him has comforted me many a
time since. Oh, death would have been awful to a solitary man in a wild
place like this!"

"Pray Heaven, Dorcas," said Reuben, in a broken voice,--"pray Heaven
that neither of us three dies solitary and lies unburied in this
howling wilderness!" And he hastened away, leaving her to watch the
fire beneath the gloomy pines.

Reuben Bourne's rapid pace gradually slackened as the pang,
unintentionally inflicted by the words of Dorcas, became less acute.
Many strange reflections, however, thronged upon him; and, straying
onward rather like a sleep walker than a hunter, it was attributable to
no care of his own that his devious course kept him in the vicinity of
the encampment. His steps were imperceptibly led almost in a circle;
nor did he observe that he was on the verge of a tract of land heavily
timbered, but not with pine-trees. The place of the latter was here
supplied by oaks and other of the harder woods; and around their roots
clustered a dense and bushy under-growth, leaving, however, barren
spaces between the trees, thick strewn with withered leaves. Whenever
the rustling of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made a
sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber, Reu