licism, "gave upon the bay." Long Island Sound, the great highway from the Northern Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate is divine), between the curving lip of the bay and the interminable and sandy shore of the island, some six leagues distant, the procession of ships and steamers stole past with an imperceptible progress, the ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened through the trees from behind, and (the day being one of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sunsteeped precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood-red maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light, drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a holiday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage of an American October, but just now, while I remember it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives-if

our star

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar,"

it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am remembering and describing-profoundly serene, sunny as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy ;-the sort of air that the visiting angels might have brought with them to the tent of Abraham-it is on such days, I would record, that my own memory steps back over the dim threshold of life-(so it seems to me)—and on such days only. It is worth the translation of our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land, if it were alone for these immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her pupils, of whom one was a new comer, and the object of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the one day of the week when morning visiters were admitted, and I was there, in compliance with an unexpected request from my friend, to present him to the agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitué in her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to introduce to me, a week or two before, the new comer of whom I have spoken above, a departure from the ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny as deeply as I should find agreeable. The new comer was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name was Nunu.

The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry of the nation. At present the sentiment takes occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to be educated at the expense of the government, and of several young men of the same high birth to different colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in history that we did not plough the bones of their fathers into our fields without some feelings of compunction. Nunu had come to the sea-bord under the charge of a female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one of the native schools of the West, and was destined, though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to her tribe when she should have masDec.-VOL. XLV. NO. CLXXX. 2 H

tered some of the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an apt scholar, but her settled melancholy when away from her books had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want of interest, and the manner of course, with which St. John had received my animated descriptions of the personal beauty of the Cherokee.

"I have hunted with the tribe," was his only answer, " and know their features."

"But she is not like them," I replied, with a tone of some impatience; "she is the beau ideal of a red-skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra. I tell you she is divine."

St. John called to his dog, and we turned along the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's house in view, and so opens a new chapter of my story.

IV.

In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael, steeped as their colours seem to have been in the divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I have scarce found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled during my Sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington. They went about in their evening walks, graceful and angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they poured the light of their loveliness on the vegetating oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those days of the scale of beauty, their features are enamelled in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by that standard (and found wanting) of every court in Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born. Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of sunshine and passion! Pale and transparent princess-pear! of the court of Florence-than whom the creations on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline our eye for the shapes of heaven ! Gipsy of the Pactolus! Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis! Bright and gifted cynosure of the aristocracy of England!-ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wandering over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to remember and adore-a constellation, I almost believe, that has absorbed all the intensest light of the beauty of a hemisphere —yet, with your pictures coloured to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm, I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile if you will!) they were as lovely, and stately, and as worthy of the worship of the world.

I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they came in. Having never seen him except in the presence of men, I was a little curious to know whether his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very slender experience. My attention was distracted at the moment of mentioning his name to

a lovely little Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the south), by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had been left in the hall; and as the door opened, and the slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight of a recognition.

In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Georgian.

"I must apologise for my dog," said St. John, bowing gracefully to the mistress of the house; "he was bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee reminded him of happier days-as it did his master."

Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but immediately resumed her apparently deep study of the abstruse figures in the Kidderminster carpet.

"You are well arrived, young gentlemen," said Mrs. Ilfrington, we press you into our service for a botanical ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you, Mr. St. John ?"

St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for their bonnets, Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was scarcely closed when Nunu re-appeared, and checking herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under very powerful emotion.

"Nunu!" he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly, and holding out his hand with the air of one who forgives an offence.

She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endearing epithets of her native tongue, in words that I only understood by their passionate and thrilling accent. The language of the heart is universal.

The fair scholars came in one after another, and we were soon on our way through the green fields to the flowery mountain-side of East Rock; Mrs. Ilfrington's arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and St. John rambling at large with the rest of the party, but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian charity had no bowels for broken hearts.

The most sociable individuals of the party for a while were Nunu and Lash; the dog's recollections of the past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreeable than the present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs. Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic which she had never displayed before, sometimes fairly outrunning the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude creature overpowered her with his caresses. The scene gave

origin to a grave discussion between that well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular force of childish association-the extraordinary intimacy between the Indian and the trapper's dog being explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that attractive principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she might have added a material corollary to her proposition. If the dog and the chief's daughter were not old friends, the chief's daughter and St. John certainly were.

As well as I could judge by the motions of two people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast in the favour and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian. Her southern indolence was probably an apology in Mrs. Ilfrington's eyes for leaning heavily on her companion's arm; but, in a momentary halt, the capricious beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully around his waist. This was rather strong on a first acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opinion.

"Miss Temple!" said she, advancing to whisper a reproof in the beauty's ear.

Before she had taken a second step, Nunu bounded over the low hedge, followed by the dog with whom she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scarf into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet on the silken fragments.

"Madam!" said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfrington, after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise and displeasure," I should have told you before that your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may have over her will be in accordance with your own wishes exclusively."

His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips and frowning

eyes.

"Have you seen her before since her arrival ?" asked Mrs. Ilfrington. "My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence that she was here. He returned from his morning ramble with a string of wampum about his neck, which had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift," he added, patting the head of the dog, and looking with a softened expression at Nunu, who drooped her head upon her bosem, and walked on

in tears.

V.

The chain of the Green Mountains, after a gallop of some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut, suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long Island Sound, and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pinetrees, three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid-career by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold precipice, you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer perpendicular below you; and, spreading away from the broken masses at its foot, lies an emerald meadow inlaid with a crystal and rambling river, across which, at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the University, from what else were a thick-serried wilderness of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serves as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of pine-tassels overhung.

Antiquity in America extends no farther back than the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary ground with us-for there harboured the regicides Whalley and Goffe, and many a breath-hushing tale is

told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Connecticut. Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say that this cavernous path to the mountain top was the resort in the holiday summer afternoons of most of the poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen Sophomores, and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Ilfrington and her seven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm, and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flowers had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded upward.

The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of pine-tassels; and emerging from the brown shadow of the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage of sighing trees overhead, a fairies' velvet beneath you, and a view below that you may as well (if you would not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the water

to see.

We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink of the precipice, and gazing off over the waters of the Sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom. We recovered our breath in silence, I alone, perhaps, of that considerable company gazing with admiration at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and motionless with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow, her small hand buried and clenched in the moss, and her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, escaped carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense control of emotion.

With a true

The game of the coquettish Georgian was well played. woman's pique, she had redoubled her attentions to my friend from the moment that she found it gave pain to another of her sex; and St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that tint of opaque and patrician white which is found oftenest in Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed towards the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine through the thick white petal of a magnolia; her eyes were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or melancholy; her teeth were like strips from the lily's heart; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, romantic-looking, superior, and, just now, the only victim in the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella unamiable; and yielded himself, as all men will, a satisfied prey to enchantments of which he knew the springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantHow singular it is that the highest and best qualities of the female heart are those with which men are the least captivated!

ress.

A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself and her tamed lion; her lap full of flowers,