What tall and tawny men were these,
As sombre, silent, as the trees
They moved among! and sad some way
With tempered sadness, ever they,
Yet not with sorrow born of fear,
The shadows of their destinies
They saw approaching year by year,
And murmured not.

. . . . .

They turned to death as to a sleep,
And died with eager hands held out
To reaching hands beyond the deep;
And died with choicest bow at hand,
And quiver full and arrow drawn
For use, when sweet to-morrow's dawn
Should wake them in the Spirit Land.

JOAQUIN MILLER.

THE BRIDGE OF THE GODS.

BOOK I.

_THE APOSTLE TO THE INDIANS._

CHAPTER I.

THE NEW ENGLAND MEETING.

Such as sit in darkness and the shadow of death.--_Bible_.

One Sabbath morning more than two hundred years ago, the dawn broke
clear and beautiful over New England. It was one of those lovely
mornings that seem like a benediction, a smile of God upon the earth,
so calm are they, so full of unutterable rest and quiet. Over the sea,
with its endless line of beach and promontory washed softly by the
ocean swells; over the towns of the coast,--Boston and Salem,--already
large, giving splendid promise of the future; over the farms and
hamlets of the interior, and into the rude clearings where the outer
limits of civilization mingled with the primeval forest, came a flood
of light as the sun rose above the blue line of eastern sea. And still
beyond, across the Alleghanies, into the depth of the wilderness,
passed the sweet, calm radiance, as if bearing a gleam of gospel
sunshine to the Indians of the forest.

Nowhere did the Sunday seem more peaceful than in a sheltered valley
in Massachusetts. Beautiful indeed were the thrifty orchards, the
rustic farmhouses, the meadows where the charred stumps that marked
the last clearing were festooned with running vines, the fields green
with Indian corn, and around all the sweep of hills dark with the
ancient wood. Even the grim unpainted meeting-house on the hill, which
was wont to look the very personification of the rigid Calvinistic
theology preached within it, seemed a little less bare and forbidding