While the maidens of Ruth were preparing a repast suited to the hour and to the quality of the guests, Mark and his son had abundant opportunity to examine the appearance of the strangers. They were men who seemed to wear visages peculiarly adapted to the characters of their entertainers being in truth so singularly demure and grave in aspect, as to excite some suspicion of their being newly-converted zealots to the mortifying customs of the Colony. Notwithstanding their extraordinary gravity, and contrary to the usages of those regions, too, they bore about their persons certain evidence of being used to the fashions of the other hemisphere. The pistols attached to their saddle-bows, and other accoutrements of a warlike aspect, would perhaps have attracted no observation, had they not been accompanied by a fashion in the doublet, the hat, and the boot, that denoted a greater intercourse with the mother country, than was usual among the less sophisticated natives of those regions. None traversed the forests without the means of defence but, on the other hand, few wore the hostile implements with so much of a worldly air, or with so many minor particularities of some recent caprice in fashion. As they had however announced themselves to be officers of the King, they, who of necessity must be chiefly concerned in the object of their visit, patiently awaited the pleasure of the strangers, to learn why duty had called them so far from all the more ordinary haunts of men: for, like the native owners of the soil, the self-restrained religionists appeared to reckon an indiscreet haste in any thing, among the more unmanly weaknesses. Nothing for the first half-hour of their visit escaped the guarded lips of men evidently well skilled in their present duty, which might lead to a clue of its purport. The morning meal passed almost without discourse, and one of the party had arisen with the professed object of looking to their steeds, before he, who seemed the chief, led the conversation to a subject, that by its political bearing might, in some degree, be supposed to have a remote connexion with the principal object of his journey to that sequestered valley. "Have the tidings of the gracious boon that hath lately flowed from the favor of the King, reached this distant settlement?" asked the principal personage, one that wore a far less military air than a younger companion, who, by his confident mien, appeared to be the second in authority. "To what boon hath thy words import?" demanded the Puritan, turning a glance of the eye it his son and daughter, together with the others in hearing, is if to admonish them to be prudent. "I speak of the Royal Charter by which the people on the banks of the Connecticut, and they of the Colony of New-Haven, are henceforth permitted to unite in government; granting them liberty of conscience, and great freedom of self-control." "Such a gift were worthy of a King! Hath Charles done this?"