"Does the white Rose," said Canondah, "fear to touch her brother, for whose life she was lately so anxious?" For sole reply, the young girl took her friend's hand, and raising the stranger from the ground, they carried him to the hollow tree, and laid him down upon his mossy couch. "When the earth is covered with darkness," said Canondah, bending over him, "Canondah will visit her brother, and pour balsam into his wounds." But her words were unmarked by the person addressed, who, with the exception of a faint breathing, gave no sign of life. The two maidens struck into the path by which they had first approached the river, and along which we will now precede them in order to introduce the reader into an entirely new world. At a short distance from the scene of the adventure above narrated, was a wide clearing, extending for about three miles along the shore. It had originally been part of a palmetto field covering the bank of the river for the breadth of half a mile, at which distance a limit was put to it by the colossal stems of the aboriginal forest. The clearing had been made by the burning of the palmettos, in whose place a carpet of luxuriant grass had sprung up, dotted with groups of magnificent trees, and intersected by natural hedges of myrtle, mangrove, palm, and tulip trees, giving to the whole tract of land the appearance of a beautiful artificial park. Here and there, through the branches of the sycamore and cotton trees, small swirls of smoke were seen curling upwards, telling of the presence of man, and on nearer inspection there became visible, under various of the groups of trees, one or more huts, surrounded by little plantations of Indian corn and tobacco, and forming collectively a scattered hamlet of some fifty habitations.