st bough was withered,
sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered how the little banner had
fluttered on that topmost bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen
years before. Whose guilt had blasted it?

. . . . . . . . . . .

Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, continued her
preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the
moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of
which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of
the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements.
It had a strange aspect that one little spot of homely comfort in the
desolate heart of Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the higher
branches of the trees that grew on rising ground; but the shadows of
evening had deepened into the hollow where the encampment was made, and
the firelight began to redden as it gleamed up the tall trunks of the
pines or hovered on the dense and obscure mass of foliage that circled
round the spot. The heart of Dorcas was not sad; for she felt that it
was better to journey in the wilderness with two whom she loved than to
be a lonely woman in a crowd that cared not for her. As she busied
herself in arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves, for
Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the gloomy forest in the
measure of a song that she had learned in youth. The rude melody, the
production of a bard who won no name, was descriptive of a winter
evening in a frontier cottage, when, secured from savage inroad by the
high-piled snow-drifts, the family rejoiced by their own fireside. The
whole song possessed the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought,
but four continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the
blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them, working
magic with a few simple words, the poet had instilled the very essence
of domestic love and household happiness, and they were poetry and
picture joined in one. As Dorcas sang, the walls of her forsaken home
seemed to encircle her; she no longer saw the gloomy pines, nor heard
the wind which still, as she began each verse, sent a heavy breath
through the branches, and died away in a hollow moan from the burden of
the song. She was aroused by the report of a gun in the vicinity of the
encampment; and either the sudden sound, or her loneliness by the
glowing fire, caused her to tremble violently. T