thou shalt be comforted."

We will endeavor to compress into a few words the more diffuse
narrative of the Recluse, confining ourselves to the substance.

It will be recollected that before Holden's constrained retirement
among the Indians, he had attached to him the squaw, Esther, by the
ties of both gratitude and respect. But it was only at a distance she
looked up to him whom she regarded as a sort of superior being. She
would not have ventured to speak to him of herself, for how could he
take an interest in so insignificant a creature? The nearer relations,
however, into which they were thrown, while he was an inmate of
her cabin, without diminishing her affection, abated her awe. The
teachings of Holden, and the strong interest he manifested for herself
and tribe so affected her, that one day she made to him a confession
of the events of her life. It is only necessary to recount those which
have a connection with this story. Some twenty years previous she had
accompanied her husband on a visit to a tribe in Kentucky, into which
some of her own relatives had been received. While there an expedition
had been undertaken by the Indians, which her husband joined, against
the white settlements, then inconsiderable, and exposed. After a few
days the warriors returned in triumph, bringing with them many
scalps, but no prisoner, except a little boy, saved by her husband,
Huttamoiden. He delivered the child to her, and having none herself,
she soon learned to love it as her own. Huttamoiden described to her
with that particularity which marks the description of natural objects
by an Indian, whose habits of life in the forest compel him to a close
observation, the situation of the log-hut from which the child was
taken, the hut itself before which leaped a mountain stream, the
appearance of the unfortunate woman who was murdered, and the