amid the surrounding gloom by the whiteness of their decay. Often we beheld the prostrate form of some old sylvan giant which had fallen and crushed down smaller trees under its immense ruin. In spots where destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a hundred trunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground, resting on their shattered limbs or tossing them desperately into the darkness, but all of one ashy white, all naked together, in desolate confusion. Thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it, the scene was ghostlike-the very land of unsubstantial things, whither dreams might betake themselves when they quit the slumberer's brain.

The

My fancy found another emblem. wild nature of America had been driven to this desert place by the encroachments of civilised man. And even here, where the savage queen was throned on the ruins of her empire, did we penetrate, a vulgar and

worldly throng, intruding on her latest solitude. In other lands, decay sits among fallen palaces; but here her home is among the forests.

Looking ahead, I discerned a distant light, announcing the approach of another boat, which soon passed us, and proved to be a rusty old scow-just such a craft as the 'Flying Dutchman' would navigate on the canal. Perhaps it was that celebrated personage himself whom I imperfectly distinguished at the helm, in a glazed cap and rough greatcoat, with a pipe in his mouth, leaving the fumes of tobacco a hundred yards behind. Shortly after, our boatman blew a horn, sending a long and melancholy note through the forest avenue, as a signal for some watcher in the wilderness to be ready with a change of horses. We had proceeded a mile or two with our fresh team, when the tow-rope got entangled in a fallen branch on the edge of the canal, and caused a momentary delay, during which I went to examine the phosphoric light of an old tree a little within the

forest.

It was not the first delusive radiance

that I had followed.

The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly converted into a mass of diseased splendour, which threw a ghastliness around. Being full of conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light, illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike torches were just fit to light up this dead forest, or to blaze coldly in tombs, when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the lanterns glimmering far away.

of

'Boat ahoy!' shouted I, making a trumpet my closed fists.

Though the cry must have rung for miles along that hollow passage of the woods, it produced no effect. These packet boats make up for their snail-like pace by never loitering day nor night, especially for those who have paid their fare. Indeed, the

captain had an interest in getting rid of me; for I was his creditor for a breakfast.

'They are gone, Heaven be praised?' ejaculated I; 'for I cannot possibly overtake them. Here am I, on the 'long level' at midnight, with the comfortable prospect of a walk to Syracuse, where my baggage will be left. And now to find a house or shed wherein to pass the night.' So thinking aloud, I took a flambeau from the old tree, burning, but consuming not, to light my steps withal, and, like a Jack-o'-lantern, set out on my midnight

tour.

THE DUSTON FAMILY.

GOODMAN Duston and his wife, somewhat less than a century and a half ago, dwelt in Haverhill, at that time a small frontier settlement in the province of Massachusetts Bay. They had already added seven children to the king's liege subjects in America; and Mrs. Duston, about a week before the period of our narrative, had blessed her husband with an eighth. One day in March 1698, when Mr. Duston had gone forth about his ordinary business, there fell out an event, which had nearly left him a childless man and a widower besides. An Indian war-party, after traversing the trackless forest all the way from Canada, broke in upon their remote and defenceless town. Goodman Duston heard the war whoop and