A loud wail burst from the whole army of Puritans, for well they knew there was none powerful like him to cope with their adversaries. The master-spirits among their opponents would not reverence his son, because the father had held them in check; and the inefficient Richard Cromwell had nothing to claim for himself. He beheld the country rent by faction, and having no power to quell insubordination, and, moreover, fearing the result to himself, he quietly resigned his Protectorate, and all that had been gained to England by Cromwell’s life, was lost in his death. Whither would now flee the fifty-nine judges who had decreed Charles Stuart to the scaffold, or where the friends of the Protector find safety? CHAPTER II. When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks; When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand. _Ibid._ Not far from the shores of a sunny lake in the depths of the American forest stood the rude log-hut of an emigrant. The site was one of surpassing loveliness—for nature here, in her unbounded domain, had done the work of ages, and the majestic oak towered in silent grandeur beside the graceful elm and the drooping willow, making mockery of art. Birds of glittering plumage sang all day in this wildwood retreat—for, save this one log-cottage, for miles and miles around was no human habitation. The slight clearing, scarcely sufficient for a garden-patch, sloping down to the water-side, told of no hardy adventurer hunting fortune in the wilderness of the new world; and it would have puzzled even a Yankee of this present age to have _guessed_ at the pursuit or object of the tenants of that forest home, so contradictory seemed they in outward aspect.