And at another time: "The pale-faces are around me thicker than the leaves of summer. I chase the hart in the hunting-grounds; he leads me to the white man's village. I drive my canoe into the rivers; they are full of the white man's ships. I visit the graves of my fathers; they are lost in the white man's corn-fields. They come like the waves of the ocean forever rolling upon the shores. Surge after surge, they dash upon the beach, and every foam-drop is a white man. They swarm over the land like the doves of winter, and the red men are dropping like withered leaves." In these passages his declamation seemed to make the whole tragedy of the story of the American Indians breathe and swell and tremble. A wonderful interest, too, was concentrated in the personal traits of Metamora himself as an individual; so true to his word, so faithful to his friend, so devoted to his wife and child, so proud of his land and his fathers, so fearless of his foe, so reverential before his God. "To his friend Metamora is like the willow,--he bends ever at the breath of those that love him. To others he is an oak. Until with your single arm you can rive the strongest tree of the forest from its earth, think not to stir Metamora when his heart says No." In the earliest scene with his wife, when ready to start on a hunt, he lingered, and directed her to take her child from its couch on the earth. He then lifted it in his hands, and stood for several seconds in an attitude so superbly defined in its outlines of strength and grace that several pictures of it were published at the time. He asked, with a look of fondness, suppressing his stern reserve, "Dost thou not love this little one, Nahmeokee?" "Ah, yes!" she replied. He then continued, in a caressing murmur like the runneling music of a brook, "When first his little eyes unclosed, thou saidst that they were like to mine." The expression of human love was so simple and complete, and so exquisitely set in the wild seclusion of nature, suggestive of the self-sufficingness of this little nest of affection embosomed in the wood and forgetful of all else in the world, that it made many a soft heart beat fast with an aching wish that stayed long after the scene was gone.