Her image, as she appeared when last he saw her, all radiant in youth and beauty, haunted his waking hours, and in his dreams she was with him as a visible presence. Months, years rolled away; he gave her up as dead, but he did not forget his long-lost bride. One summer's day, while sitting in his cabin in Michigan, in one of those beautiful natural parks, where he had chosen his abode, he heard a light step, and, looking up, saw his bride standing before him, beautiful still, but with a chastened beauty which told of years of separation and grief. Her story was a long one. When she was borne away from the marriage feast by her savage captor, she was seen by an old squaw, the wife of a famous chief who had just lost her own daughter, and being attracted by the beauty of Miss Rouse, she protected her from violence, and finally adopted her. Twice she escaped, but was recaptured. The old squaw afterwards took her a thousand miles into the wilderness, and watched her with the ferocious tenderness that the tigress shows for her young. At length, after nearly six years, her Indian mother died. She succeeded then in making her escape, traveled four hundred miles on foot, reached the St. Lawrence, and after passing through great perils and hardships, arrived at Detroit. There she soon found friends, who relieved her wants and conveyed her to her husband, whom she had remembered with fondness and loved with constancy during all the weary years of her captivity. CHAPTER XI. PATHETIC PASSAGES OF PIONEER LIFE. A hundred ills brood over the cabin in the wilderness. Some are ever-present; others lie in wait, and start forth at intervals. Labor, Solitude, Fear; these are the companions of woman on the border: to these come other visitants--weariness, and that longing, yearning, pining of the heart which the Germans so beautifully term _sehn-sucht_--hunger, vigils, bodily pain and sickness, the biting cold, the drenching storm, the fierce heat, with savage eyes of man and beast glaring from the thicket. Then sorrow takes bodily shape and enters the house; loved ones are borne away--the child, or the father, or saddest of all, the mother; the long struggle is over, and the devoted woman of the household lays her wasted form beneath the grassy sod of the cabin yard. Bereavement is hard to bear in even the houses where comfort, ease, and luxury surround the occupants, where friends and kinsfolk crowd to pour out sympathy and consolation. But what must it be in the rude cabin on the lonely border? The grave hollowed out in the hard soil of the little inclosure, the rough shell-coffin hewn with tears from the forest tree, the sorrowing household ranged in silence beside the form which will gladden the loneliness of that stricken family no longer, and then the mourners turn away and go back to their homely toils.