At the dinner which followed, it was my great good fortune to make a new acquaintance, and one I had occasion to prize more and more as the years went by. This in the person of Constance’s companion and teacher, Setti, a young person who had lately come to make one of Mr. Seymour’s family; and strangely enough for such companionship, and improbable you will say, she was of pure Indian blood. No one, however, would have known this, for except that her hair and eyes were black and her complexion olive rather than dark, she was in no wise different from those about her. She was above medium height, with graceful figure, and soft, shy manners that were truly captivating, and in regard to this last there was no difference of opinion. Her history, while it would be strange now and romantic in the extreme, was not thought peculiar at the time of which I speak. For you must know she was found when a child, playing beside the body of her dead mother on the Thames battlefield, where Tecumseh fell, a little way across the Canadian border. The officer who thus discovered her took her to his home and educated her, treating her in all things as his child. This until some months back, when, his family being broken up by one of the dreadful scourges of sickness common in the new country, Mr. Seymour had asked her to become the companion and instructor of Constance. While nothing was known of Setti’s parentage, it was thought she was the daughter of some great chief, from the ornaments clasped about her neck, and which she still wore. Of these, one was a cross of mixed gold and silver, sunk in an oval frame of copper and lead, the handiwork of some Indian craftsman, who, it was apparent, had only rude tools and molten metals with which to work. Another ornament, and one that struck you strangely, was a serpent, hammered out of pure iron and inlaid with silver; but of its significance nothing was known. Afterward, when I came to know this sweet creature as one does a sister or cherished friend, I could never discover anything to indicate her savage ancestry, save, perhaps, a reticence of speech unusual in attractive women—if I except, perhaps, a startled look she sometimes wore when coming suddenly upon any new or remarkable experience in life. This peculiarity, however, we see in people of our own blood, and so it should not have been thought strange in her. In all other respects there was nothing about her to mark the abrupt step from savagery to civilized life, for her intelligence was in all things of the order and delicacy that characterizes refined women. Her beauty and sweetness of disposition, too, were such as to confirm the romantic notions I have ever held respecting the Indian character; and it was no doubt due to her and other kindly influences that I was first led to believe our treatment of the Indian tribes had been somewhat lacking in wisdom and humanity. Mr. Seymour was also of this opinion, and never lost an opportunity to