tinual anxiety.

Locks, bolts and bars shut out the thief who coveted your jewels; but no
bolts nor bars, however ingeniously constructed or strongly made, could
keep out the thief who coveted your character. One little word from a
pretended friend might consummate the sorrow of your whole life, and be
witnessed by the perpetrator without a pang--nay, even with exultation.

There were other miseries I thought of that were common in my country.
There were those we love. Some who are woven into our lives and
affections by the kinship of blood; who grow up weak and vacillating,
and are won away, sometimes through vice, to estrangement. Our hearts
ache not the less painfully that they have ceased to be worthy of a
throb; or that they have been weak enough to become estranged, to
benefit some selfish alien.

There were other sorrows in that world that I had come from, that
brought anguish alike to the innocent and the guilty. It was the sorrow
of premature death. Diseases of all kinds made lives wretched; or tore
them asunder with death. How many hearts have ached with cankering pain
to see those who are vitally dear, wasting away slowly, but surely, with
unrelievable suffering; and to know that life but prolongs their misery,
and death relieves it only with inconsolable grief for the living.

Who has looked into a pair of youthful eyes, so lovely that imagination
could not invent for them another charm, and saw the misty film of death
gather over them, while your heart ached with regret as bitter as it was
unavailing. The soft snows of winter have fallen--a veil of purity--over
the new made graves of innocence and youth, and its wild winds have been
the saddest requiem. The dews of summer have wept with your tears, and
its zephyrs have sighed over the mouldering loveliness of youth.

I had known no skill in my world that could snatch from death its
unlawful prey of youth. But here, in this land so eminently blessed, no
one regarded death as a dreaded invader of their household.

"_We cannot die until we get old_," said Wauna, naively.

And looking upon their bounding animal spirits, their strong supple
frames, and the rich, red blood of perfect health, mantling their cheeks
with its unsurpassable bloom, one would think that disease must have
strong grasp indeed that could destroy them.

But these were not all the sorrows that my own country knew. Crimes,
with which we had no personal connection, shocked us with their