We left her, alone, in her little dug-out, paddling or drifting down the river with the stream. She pursued this progress with proper caution. In approaching the headlands around which the river swept, on that side which was occupied by Dunbar, she suspended the strokes of her paddle, leaving her silent boat to the direction of the currents. The night was clear and beautiful, and the river undefaced by shadow, except when the current bore her beneath the overhanging willows which grew numerously along the margin, or when the winds flung great masses of smoke from the burning woods across its bright, smooth surface. With these exceptions, the river shone in a light not less clear and beautiful because vague and capricious. Moonlight and starlight seem to make a special atmosphere for youth, and the heart which loves, even when most troubled with anxieties for the beloved one, never, at such a season, proves wholly insensible to the soft, seductive influences of such an atmosphere. Our Frederica was not the heroine of convention. She had never imbibed romance from books; but she had affections out of which books might be written, filled with all those qualities, at once strong and tender, which make the heroine in the moment of emergency. Her heart softened, as, seated in the centre of her little vessel, she watched the soft light upon the wave, or beheld it dripping, in bright, light droplets, like fairy glimmers, through the over-hanging foliage. Of fear—fear for herself—she had no feeling. Her apprehensions were all for Richard Coulter, and her anxieties increased as she approached the celebrated promontory and swamp forest, known to this day upon the river as “Bear Castle.” She might be too late. The captain of the loyalists had the start of her, and her only hope lay in the difficulties by which he must be delayed, going through a _blind_ forest and under imperfect guidance—for she still had large hopes of Brough’s fidelity. She _was_ too late—too late for her purpose, which had been to forewarn her lover in season for his escape. She was drifting toward the spot where the river, at full seasons, made across the low neck by which the promontory of “Bear Castle” was united with the main land. Her paddle no longer dipt the water, but was employed solely to protect her from the overhanging branches beneath which she now prepared to steer. It was at her approach to this point, that she was suddenly roused to apprehension by the ominous warning chant set up by the African.