the passage of time until a silvery light recalls their | grimage to the sea-shore for purification—the fasting attention to the rear, and there, beyond the bright track of the moonbeams, appear the low shores and forests of India, dim in the distance, fast sinking beneath the horizon.

tum and Eleusis. The “eye of Greece" now deso- | song of the Chian-Homer. Still wanders the Brahlate, still courts the shade of Hymethus-the suns min, no longer at Elephantum, in India's groves rise and set no more on the home of the Arts and the alone, unchanged amid the changing scenes around Muses-no longer gild the morning rays a glittering him. Still flows the Ganges, the mightiest of eastern Acropolis-no longer chime the aulic notes with the waters.

MEMORY'S CONSOLATION.

WE LAID HER DOWN TO REST.

THE PEDANT:

OR CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE SPENT PARTLY IN CAROLINA.

BY HENRY HOLM, ESQ.

CHAPTER XI.

(Concluded from page 167.)

I think that the better half, and much the most agreeable one, of the pleasures of the mind is best enjoyed while one is upon one's legs. MALTHUS.

DREADING as I do any thing which might tempt my patient readers to anticipate adventure, plot, or catastrophe in these chapters, I must premise that the bit of episode, which I am about to relate, is all for the sake of introducing a friend, whose gifts and example wrought a critical change in my studies. It will transfer the attention to certain localities of our neighboring state.

ley, from certain eminences; all these peculiarities of a mountainous region tended to subdue in young Albert whatever existed of the busy and the pragmatical, and to send him musing to the upland levels. or to the shady spots where crags beetling over the black waters produced the effect of a grotto.

His French blood was like that which ran in the veins of Victor de St. Paul, De Rancy, St. Cyr and Pascal. Though a Protestant by education, he nevertheless loved Fenelon; and in turning over the cases of uncut volumes, which his father had ordered from Paris, to constitute his library, Albert soon found himself detained over Bourdaloue and Guion. How remote this taste was from any that prevailed either in France or America, in the latter part of the last century, it is scarcely necessary to say. The French revolution, and the political quarrels of America. almost extinguished the meditative element in society. Generous philosophy and contemplative reli

Americans need not go to Vaucluse or Vallambrosa for the picturesque; there are scenes among our mountains and our virgin forests which, though different from any thing in the old world, are yet unsurpassed. Especially among the solitudes of that great chain of mountains which runs like a spine from north-east to south-west across many states, there are spots where the sublime and the enchant-gion were never in a lower state. In order to preing meet, and where the most longing soul might find itself sated with the exuberance of beauty.

serve any remnants of ascetic or tranquil piety, amidst such commotions, it was necessary to grow up in solitude and to converse with the past. Even monasteries in Europe became places of political gladiatorship, and unfrocked monks were wearing the red cap, and spouting regicide speeches at the Jacobins. These were no halcyon days, but times of tempest.

Amidst such seclusions had dwelt my neighbor De Mornay, while yet a youth. He was not a native, indeed, for he was not an American. During the latter years of our Revolution, when Pulaski, Gallatin, and other distinguished foreigners, came to share our fortunes, a Breton gentleman arrived, and disembarked at City Point, below Richmond, with certain mercantile claims upon the State of Virginia. Shortly after his arrival, he made large purchases of land upon the upper waters of the James River; but he had scarcely completed his bargain when he was carried off by one of the fevers of the country. The only representative whom he left was a beauti-political world; but these were much like the conful boy of fourteen, Albert de Mornay, already mentioned as the subject of this chapter.

Far, far from these, under the clear skies, and among the gigantic mountain groves of the Allegheny, the days of Albert floated by. The rare appearance of a post-rider, and the occasional gift of a stray newspaper, informed him indeed from time to time of the successive quakings and eruptions in the old

vulsions of another planet. His ties to them were very much sundered. He lived in two worlds, but neither of them was the world of turbulent political affairs; he passed daily between the paradise of books, in which he held high converse with the mighty dead, and the paradise of nature, in which he communed with God himself. His training. though solitary, was not incomplete. The best part of every man's education is that which he gives himself. Yet Albert was not entirely alone.

With all the acumen and warmth which prevail in the best French character, Albert had a decided turn for the contemplative and the mystical, which was encouraged and fostered by his insulation among some of the loveliest recesses of nature. The forests through which he roamed, unbroken by woodman's axe, and bounded over by the aboriginal deer; the frowning crags which towered over his precipitous path, far up beyond the reach of adventurous foot- When the elder De Mornay found himself to be steps, where the young eagles waited in the eyry for dying, he committed his young son to the only friend the rapacious parents' return; the streams, rushing whom he knew in that part of America; this was over clean channels in the rock, and pellucid to the another Frenchman, who bore the name of Guerin, bottom, even when many feet in depth; the wide a royalist refugee, once a doctor of the Sorbonne, champaign prospects, opened up and down the val- I but now (such changes were not uncommon) secu

larized, and seeking his bread by the only science | many French priests into infidels, had only made which he could turn into a useful art, namely, Guerin half a Protestant. He was too yielding and mathematics. Singular was the providence which too timid to those of his early profession; nor did had thrown the orphan boy into the arms of such a his circumstances demand it. But he acquired forman. Guerin was rather below the middle stature, bearance, and enlarged the circle of his survey. In but with that symmetry of person which leaves no- turning over the volumes at Crowscrag, the mountain thing to desire. His complexion was fair; his brow home of Albert, he learned to recognize some virtue was open and serene, surmounting a clear, large, even in a Huguenot, and to admire the argument, and innocent, contemplative eye; the brown hair had taste the truth of writers such as Chamier, Plessis gathered itself at the sides of his well-formed head, du Mornay, Claude, Sauria, and Bonnet. He and his leaving the crown in a state of natural tonsure, be- pupil talked them over among the limestone rocks fitting his former vocation. Delicate lips and regu- and caverns of the mountains. But Guerin had cravlar teeth, taken in connection with hands which had ings which his mercurial ward could not understand. known no early labor, conveyed the impression of The abbé, as he loved to call him, as if penetrated by rank and refinement. When forced to fly, the exile the mysterious "Zeit-Geist," swelled with inward finds celibacy to be an advantage. Guerin was happy longings for communion with the spiritual. The even in the wilds of America; he was more than sound of the great ocean came to him even in his happy when he found not only a ward and compa- solitude; while Albert felt that truth, if ever reached, nion, in his friend's son, but a thousand friends re- was for men, for man. Both were religious in vived, in his library. their thoughts; but Albert's religion was less of form and dogma, and more of expansive affection and lofty aspirations. The kind-hearted priest often charged to the account of Protestantism certain traits in his young friend, which he could not understand, and wondered to see him dissatisfied with all the beauties and glories of his mountain-home.

No one could be less fitted to bring up a young man in the ways of the world; but then he could induct him into all the mysteries of classic and romantic knowledge. He spoke Latin with a purity which has always been coveted in the seminaries of France. He had spent some years at Rome, and was at home in all the works of Dante, Ariosto, Boccacio, Tasso and Petrarca. So much had he been secluded from public affairs, that the old world was almost as familiar to him as the new. True, he was strange to woodcraft and the ways of the hunts man. Never had he discharged a gun; its lock was as mysterious to him as a catapulta. Never had he acquired the gentle art of taking the mountain trout; and when he sat on the green bank, and lifted up his eyes from Lucretius or Seneca, he looked amazed at the line running off Albert's reel, and at the speckled creatures which the gentle but arch boy landed at his feet.

Never were master and scholar better matched; and the relation is a tender one. If Guerin was more pensive than jocose, he could nevertheless relish wit and humor, and he perceived that Albert was daily unfolding new tendencies toward the spiritual and superhuman. The teacher could therefore consent to be laughed at for his bad English, and to bear his share of the burden when Albert had brought down a buck. His brown-study would often be broken by some song of his companion, generally English, such as

Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry pote
Unto the sweet-bird's throat,
Here shall he see

Albert possessed a dog, which, as if to mock the attempts of the abbe at English consonants, was named Thwackthwart; an awful mouthful, and second only to the proverbial exercise for foreigners, of "thirty thousand thorns thrust through the thick of their thumbs." The aforesaid Thwackthwart was of that color which you would not willingly denominate, lest you should find it was gray, when you had called it brown; a terrier of such a symmetric shape and attractive shagginess, that at length his ugliness acquired a sort of beauty. I am sure the reader has just such a dog in his mind's eye, even it he has never had its teeth in the calf of his leg. He was exceedingly useful in a mountain-house, and accompanied Albert on every expedition. As there were no ladies at Crowscrag to be alarmed by such an event, it was not unusual, when the chase had been active, or the weather tempting, for Albert to absent himself several days at a time. However unwelcome this may have been to the abbé, he did not complain, but mildly took his seat at the little round table, and gave his orders to Sambo, the servant. Sambo was on the wane of years, but had once been an athletic man, with noticeable signs of Indian blood in his face, while he passed for an African. He was older than any of them, as a dweller in these wilds, and even remembered when buffalo were known to cross low parts of the Allegheny chain.

One night, early in May, Guerin was seated at the door of the lonely wooden mansion, which, from its situation under the eastern brow of a rocky mountain, was named Crowscrag. The weather was warm for the season, and a heavy cloud in the southwest was giving forth signs of an approaching thundergust. The muttering of the coming storm, and the angry flashes increased as night came on. At length when darkness had begun to prevail, each renewal

body of poor Thwackthwart was found a few miles nearer to the river. Following this clew, Sambo divined, by infallible signs, that a party had taken canoes at a certain bluff, where also was discovered an illegible sentence freshly cut, or began to be cut. on the smooth bark of a beech. The heart-broken priest, as his only resource, betook himself to Richmond for aid and counsel; and after waiting there for some mouths, with no news of de Mornay, he sadly obeyed a vocation to the island of Martinique, fully persuaded that his companion had fallen under the ruthless weapons of the savage; an event by no means uncommon in that stage of our history.

of the lurid glare revealed wide tracts of the gray | the edifice of logs. What was more significant, the valleys, and disclosed yawning depths in the ragged hills, while the rain descended in torrents. Albert was still absent, and though both courageous and robust, was, in the estimation of his friend, exposed to manifold dangers. There was no house within many miles, except a temporary lodge on the opposite mountain, which had been used as a station in topographical surveys. This, though several miles distant, was so situated as to be visible by daylight; and Guerin often endeavored to catch a glimpse of it with his pocket-telescope, during intervals of the electric illumination. Midnight came, however, and yet no tidings of the wanderer. The good abbé paced the floor for hours, but at length yielded to weariness, and slept soundly. When he awoke to the clear shining of another day, he felt a pang at not seeing Albert; and he never saw him more.

CHAPTER XII.

Vadit, fremit, refringit virgulta pede vago.

CATULLUS. ATTYS, v. 86.

This most untoward event it was, which brought me acquainted with the friend whom of all others 1 shall ever remember with the liveliest and tenderest regard; perpetually applying to him since his death the expressions of Shenstone's celebrated epitaph"Here, quanto minus Cum reliquis versari, Quam tui meminisse!"

Let me purposely abridge the horrors of the tale The grandfathers of some who read this have told De Mornay, after being taken by a wearisome

them how the settlements of their childhood were series of posts northward through what is now put in fear by the irruption of the Indians; an evil as the state of Ohio, was inducted into the Indian life little feared in our own day as the ravages of the mi- not far from a British block-house near Lake Erie. notaur or other mythic monsters. These onsets One day, when he was accompanying his chief and were frequently made into the secluded valleys of that father, We-mo-tox, or Burning Broomgrass, to a talk rugged district through which the Kanawha finds its with the whites, he was recognized by a Highland course to the Ohio, from the great spine of mountains major, who had a brother among the Frazers of which traverses Virginia and Carolina. Striking North Carolina. A correspondence ensued, and the across from the Ohio to the Sciota, the Shawnees gallant Major Frazer, in the depth of winter, set out used to pursue a "trail” well-known to hunters, and with De Mornay, who was gaunt and half-crippled passing in its route the town of Major-Jack, where from the exposures and chagrins of captivity, and Chilicothe now stands. Thither in more than one brought him in a sort of triumph to the banks of instance they carried away captive men, women and the Roanoke. I was on a visit at Duncan Frazer's. children. Although their usual practice was to slay when the major, long expected, arrived with the and scalp all able-bodied men, yet the aboriginal cayoung stranger, whose story had come before him. price sometimes led them to make exceptions in Pallid and haggard as he was, with long, tangled favor of a fine fellow taken even in arms; as for ex- hair, and habiliments in which the deer-skin oddly ample when the chief who was prowling was visited mingled with the cut of a garrison tailor on the lakes, with some mysterious yearning to supply by adop- Albert struck me as I have seldom been struck by a tion the loss of a darling son. These statements are first appearance. The deep black eye shone with a necessary to explain the absence of Albert, who, to melancholy lustre of natural gayety subdued by sudsay truth, had fallen into the hands of a party of den and early grief. Gentleness, pain, courage and Shawnees, after being surprised in the mountain meditation were in his brow, his glance, and his relodge to which he had retreated from the storm. Iluctant smile. That night I prayed him to share my am not about to tell an Indian story; such may be habitation and my pursuits, and he was my combetter heard in any frontier inn; I will therefore re-panion till-how shall I utter it-he sank away during turn to my disconsolate abbé. years of beautiful decline.

When Guerin awoke to the reality of his loss, and had allowed two days to pass without any signs of his young friend, he was almost beside himself. Scarcely was there a man on earth less fitted for the adventures of a new country. Yet he set on foot a variety of explorations, by means of mountain rangers, and more especially of Sambo, whose habits and training assimilated him to the native tribes. The mountain-lodge showed signs, obscure indeed to the eye of civilization, but patent and convincing to the sagacity of foresters, that a party had halted there. It was manifest that there had been a recent fire, and some remnants of a wild turkey were near

CHAPTER XIII.

So shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.

COLERIDGE.

There is something hard to express in the retrospect which one takes in chilly and over-prudent old age, of the periods when youth was boiling over, and when the mind, so far from being ashamed of its enthusiasms, rather gloried in them. It is not merely in trances of youthful love, that the soul is 'rapt into a condition above what is normal and beyond what