The place where the scene of this story is laid, I have said was a lone village; it had no communication with other places by means of boats, although its water privileges were abundant; and between it and neighbouring towns intervened an extent of country, consisting of pine-barrens, where no settlements could exist, or at least any that deserved the name. There were those, however, who dwelt amid its dreary solitudes, and called it home. Scattered here and there upon an area of ten to fifteen miles square, might be seen, sometimes alone and sometimes in clusters of three or four, a few miserable dwellings, made principally of logs. A door, and one window without glass, were the only openings to these abodes; and a rude chimney running up against the outside, formed a receptacle for the pine logs, which blazed often through the long winter nights, the only light they could afford, as well as almost their only protection from the searching cold. Poverty and wretchedness generally make sad havoc with the human frame; the haggard countenance, the dry and skinny hands, the stoop, the feeble, tottering gait, we expect and look for, when visiting abodes that betoken destitution. But miserable as was the appearance of these dwellings, the aspect of their inhabitants was generally that of health and sufficiency; their swarthy complexions, and fine athletic forms, almost compelled the traveller through these lonely regions to believe that he had alighted upon a tribe of those sons of the forest who once called our country all their own. The moral character of this people was in keeping with the aspect of their dwellings. Having no regular religious instruction, seldom hearing the voice of a living teacher, with scarce a Bible to be found within their gloomy houses, they were but little in advance of the heathen as to religious knowledge, and far too near allied to them in many of their vicious habits. They earned their daily bread by laboring amid the lofty and dense forests, in levelling the majestic pines, cutting them into lengths suitable for transportation, and conveying them to the outskirts of the barrens: their hire was but a pittance when considered as a remuneration for their toil, but it enabled them to live; it procured for them food, coarse indeed, but enough to satisfy their appetite, and the plain and simple clothing which necessity demanded, or to which perhaps their taste aspired. The owners of these forests lived at some distance, and employed an agent to attend to all the various labors of preparing the timber and conveying it to market.