suspended a moment, and then drop back again to the ground for another trial. The terrified maiden now gave herself up as lost, and tried to quell the tumult of her frenzied feelings, that she might meet her approaching fate, as dreadful as it was, with calmness and resignation. But the terrific noise of her maddened assailants, as they leaped up, snapping, snarling, and howling, in demoniac chorus, and made nearer and nearer approaches every moment to her person, once more aroused her natural instinct for self-preservation; and she arose, and, standing upon her feet, involuntarily bent over one end of her support to catch a view of what was passing below. In withdrawing her shrinking gaze from the fiercely upheaving heads and fiery eyeballs which there greeted her, she espied the guns of the Indians still standing against the wall, almost directly beneath her, with the muzzles extending upward within the reach of her arm. With the rapid process of thought which danger is known often to beget, a new plan of deliverance, suggested by the discovery just made, was instantly formed and digested in her mind. And in its pursuance, she drew a white handkerchief from her pocket, and, hastily folding it together, threw it down to the farthest corner of the room below. As she had anticipated, the whole gang rushed after it. And instantly seizing the opportunity thus afforded to execute her design, she hastily balanced herself on the edge of the bark the most nearly over the guns, reached down her arm, grasped one of the muzzles, and drew up the heavy weapon, just in time to escape the baffled brutes as they came bounding back, with redoubled howls of rage and disappointment, to the spot. Too much accustomed, in the new settlement in which she had been mostly reared, to the sight and even handling of fire-arms not to know how to use them, she cocked the piece, and, again advancing to the edge of her platform, pointed down into the thickest of the infuriated pack, and fired. One wild, piercing yelp followed the deafening explosion, and, the next instant, all the survivors of the hushed and frightened gang were heard scrambling through the window, and scattering and fleeing off with desperate speed into the surrounding forest. With the last sounds of the retreating steps of the wolves, and with the relief which a returning sense of safety brought to the over-wrought feelings of the maiden, all her strength gave way, and, sinking down, weak and helpless as an infant, she sobbed out, in the broken murmurs of an overflowing heart, her gratitude to Heaven for her deliverance from the horrid death from which she had so narrowly escaped. For a while she could only tremble and weep; but at length the violence of her emotions began gradually to subside, exhausted nature would be cheated no longer, and she sunk into slumber, too sound, happily, to permit her to dream over the fearful scenes of the past.