Chapter 4

"I' the name of something holy, sir, why stand you
In this strange stare?"

Tempest.

As a girl, Ruth Harding had been one of the mildest and gentlest of the
human race. Though new impulses had been given to her naturally kind
affections by the attachments of a wife and mother, her disposition
suffered no change by marriage. Obedient, disinterested, and devoted to
those she loved, as her parents had known her, so, by the experience of
many years, had she proved to Content. In the midst of the utmost
equanimity of temper and of deportment, her watchful solicitude in behalf
of the few who formed the limited circle of her existence, never
slumbered. It dwelt unpretendingly but active in her gentle bosom, like a
great and moving principle of life. Though circumstances had placed her
on a remote and exposed frontier, where time had not been given for the
several customary divisions of employments, she was unchanged in habits,
in feelings, and in character. The affluence of her husband had elevated
her above the necessity of burthensome toil; and, while she had
encountered the dangers of the wilderness, and neglected none of the
duties of her active station, she had escaped most of those injurious
consequences which are a little apt to impair the peculiar loveliness of
woman. Notwithstanding the exposure of a border life, she remained
feminine, attractive, and singularly youthful.

The reader will readily imagine the state of mind, with which such a being
watched the distant form of a husband, engaged in a duty like that we have
described. Notwithstanding the influence of long habit, the forest was
rarely approached, after night-fall, by the boldest woodsman, without some
secret consciousness that he encountered a positive danger. It was the
hour when its roaming and hungry tenants were known to be most in motion;
and the rustling of a leaf, or the snapping of a dried twig beneath the
light tread of the smallest animal, was apt to conjure images of the
voracious and fire-eyed panther, or perhaps of a lurking biped, which,
though more artful, was known to be scarcely less savage. It is true, that
hundreds experienced the uneasiness of such sensations, who were never
fated to undergo the realities of the fearful pictures. Still, facts were
not wanting to supply sufficient motive for a grave and reasonable
apprehension.

Histories of combats with beasts of prey, and of massacres by roving and
lawless Indians, were the moving legends of the border. Thrones might be
subverted, and kingdoms lost and won, in distant Europe, and less should
be said of the events, by those who dwelt in these woods, than of one
scene of peculiar and striking forest incident, that called for the
exercise of the