the last month, but especially since his singular awakening the past night, had constituted the chief burden of his mind,--his increasing apprehensions for his father's safety, and his lurking but irrepressible regard for the chief's beautiful daughter, whose image, since his dream, had haunted him with a pertinacity for which a resort to reason alone would fail to account. "If music be the food of love," dreams, we apprehend, whatever the immortal bard might have thought of the matter, have often proved the more exciting stimulus of the tender passion; many of whose happiest consummations might be traced back to an origin in some peopled scene of a dreaming fancy, whose peculiar effect on the sympathies has frequently been felt by the sternest and most sceptical, though never very clearly explained in any of our written systems of the philosophy of the soul and its affections. In the pleasing indulgence of the feelings and fancies which had been thus freshly kindled, Claud stood, for some minutes, quite unconscious of the lapse of time, though it had been long enough to place his companions far out of sight and hearing. From this reverie he was suddenly aroused by the sharp report of a rifle, bursting on his ear from the woods, about a quarter of a mile off, in the direction just taken by his companions. Starting at the sound, which sent a boding chill through his heart, and bitterly taxing himself for his inadvertent loitering, he sprang back to the trail he had left, and made his way along over it towards the place indicated by the firing, with all the speed which excited nerves and agonizing anxiety could bring to his aid. But, before reaching the spot at which he was aiming, and just as he was beginning to slacken his pace, to look around for it, Gaut Gurley burst through the bushes, a few rods ahead, and, running towards him with all the manifestations of a man in hasty retreat before a pursuing foe, eagerly exclaimed: "Run, Claud! run for your life! We have just been beset by hostile Indians, who fired on us, and, I fear, have killed your father. I have misled them a little; but they will soon be on our trail. Run! run!" he added, seizing the other by the arm to start him into instant flight. "What!" exclaimed the astonished young man, hanging back, and by degrees recovering from the surprise with which he was at first overwhelmed by the strange and startling announcement. "What! hostile Indians?--hostile to whom, to my father, or to me, that I should run from them? Gaut Gurley, what, O what does this mean?" "Why, it means," said the other, keeping up all the motions and flourishes naturally used by one urging another to flee,--"it means, as I say, our lives are in danger. Let us escape while we can. Come, come, there's not a moment to lose!"