This most untoward event it was, which brought me acquainted with the friend whom of all others I 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. De Mornay, after being taken by a wearisome series of posts northward through what is now the state of Ohio, was inducted into the Indian life not far from a British block-house near Lake Erie. One day, when he was accompanying his chief and father, We-mo-tox, or Burning Broomgrass, to a talk with the whites, he was recognized by a Highland major, who had a brother among the Frazers of North Carolina. A correspondence ensued, and the gallant Major Frazer, in the depth of winter, set out with De Mornay, who was gaunt and half-crippled from the exposures and chagrins of captivity, and brought him in a sort of triumph to the banks of the Roanoke. I was on a visit at Duncan Frazer’s, when the major, long expected, arrived with the young stranger, whose story had come before him. Pallid and haggard as he was, with long, tangled hair, and habiliments in which the deer-skin oddly mingled with the cut of a garrison tailor on the lakes, Albert struck me as I have seldom been struck by a first appearance. The deep black eye shone with a melancholy lustre of natural gayety subdued by sudden and early grief. Gentleness, pain, courage and meditation were in his brow, his glance, and his reluctant smile. That night I prayed him to share my habitation and my pursuits, and he was my companion till—how shall I utter it—he sank away during years of beautiful decline. 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.