The adventure of young Stanley, recorded in the last chapter, made a strong impression on his mind. The more he reflected on what he had beheld, the more he became convinced that it was no mere conjuration of his fancy. Nothing in his feelings at the moment, absorbed as they were with thoughts of the little truant he had been seeking, could have suggested to his imagination the image which arose before him. That it was an embodiment of some kind he became therefore convinced, though he could not believe either that it was human, when he remembered the sudden and mysterious manner of its disappearance. Frank Stanley was by nature neither timorous nor credulous, and a course of reading, more extensive than usual for boys at his age, had in some degree fortified his mind against the attacks of superstition; but he would have been an actual prodigy, if, living in New England in the end of the seventeenth century, he had possessed a philosophy which did not exist there until much later. Those, therefore, who will recall to mind the superstitious feelings at that time prevalent among the early settlers, will not be surprised that our youthful hero should have closed his reflections with the conviction that he had beheld a supernatural visitant. That its mission, however, was not an unholy one he might have believed, when he recollected that he had seen it keeping watch over the lost child of his boyish love, and that its voice had been the means of directing him to the spot where she lay. But he had so strongly imbibed the common idea that all supernatural indications were demonstrations of the Evil One, that his cogitations the rather resolved themselves into fears that she who had been so guarded by one of His emissaries, though in the form of the being of light that he had beheld, was marked out as a victim of future destruction. This idea became agony to the sensitive mind of the boy, whose heart had outstripped, in a great measure, his years, and was fixed with sentiments of strong attachment upon the little girl. He determined, therefore, to keep constant watch upon the child’s movements, and should he behold her again in the hands of the tempter, by timely warning to her sister to enlist her in attempts to destroy the power of the enemy by fasting and prayer. Thoughts of the kind described had disturbed Stanley’s mind during the whole night succeeding his adventure, and caused him the first sleepless pillow he had ever known. He rose earlier than usual the next day. Feeling languid from want of his customary rest, he walked out to recover his freshness in the morning air. Even to those who, like Stanley, have spent a sleepless and anxious night, the breeze of the dawn brings strength and quickening both of mind and body. He bent his steps involuntarily toward the place of the previous day’s innocent revel.