200 A BUSINESS DAY AT CHEE-HA. 



these forests ; intent, like ourselves, on the plea- 

 sures of the chase? Gone like those bubbles! 

 scattered like the leaves of a former season by the 

 blast of the whirlwind, or buried (as those now 

 falling about me were soon to be) undistinguished 

 beneath the soil ! their musical dialect every day 

 upon our tongues, and they forgotten as though 

 they had never been ! And where were they who 

 dispossessed them ? the early white colonists ? 

 gone like themselves ! The spreading oaks hard 

 by, marked their traditionary graves ; but their 

 histories, their very names, already indistinct from 

 time, arc fading day by day from human memory ! 

 Shall we, too, pass away and be forgotten ? must 

 the like oblivion rest on us, and on the race to 

 which we belong? "What unthought-of page, in 

 the unsearchable book of futurity, might yet be 

 ours ! I was roused from these reveries by a sound 

 like that of a distant gun; it was very indistinct; 

 it might be the stroke of the woodman's axe or 

 the crash of a falling tree ; it roused me, however, 

 and, mounting my horse, I rode a short distance to 

 the east of my late position, and stood in the gorge 

 of a small ravine, open in front, whence I com- 

 manded the bluff on the left and the marsh on my 

 right. I might have relapsed into my former 

 musing, but for a restless motion of my horse's 



