Still ‘the voices of his home’ were often ringing in his ear by day and by night; and the desire to know the fate of his beloved family, and once more to behold each fondly-cherished member of it, would sometimes come over him with an intensity that seemed to absorb every other feeling.  Then he would devise plan after plan, by which he might hope to obtain some intelligence of the settlement, or convey to his relatives the knowledge of his safety.  But never had he yet succeeded.  Tisquantum had taken watchful care, for several years, to prevent any such communication being effected; and it was, as we have seen mainly with this object that he had absented himself from the rest of his tribe, and his own former place of abode.

He had led his warriors and their families far to the north, and there he had resided for several years; only returning occasionally to the south-western prairies for the hunting season, and again travelling northward when the buffalo and the elk were no longer abundant in the plains.  In all these wanderings Henrich had rejoiced; and his whole soul had been elevated by such constant communion with the grandest works of nature—­or rather, of nature’s God.  He had gazed on the stupendous cataract of Niagara, and listened to its thunders,[*] till he felt himself in the immediate presence of Deity in all its omnipotence.

[Footnote:  O-ni-ga-rah, ‘the Thunder of Waters,’ is the Indian name for these magnificent falls.]

He had crossed the mighty rivers of America, that seemed to European eyes to be arms of the sea; and had passed in light and frail canoes over those vast lakes that are themselves like inland oceans.  And, in the high latitudes to which the restless and apprehensive spirit of Tisquantum had led him, he had traveled over boundless fields of snow in the sledges of the diminutive Esquimaux, and lodged in their strange winter-dwellings of frozen snow, that look as if they were built of the purest alabaster, with windows of ice as clear as crystal.  And marvelously beautiful those dwellings were in Henrich’s eyes, as be passed along the many rooms, with their cold walls glittering with the lamp-light, or glowing from the reflection of the fire of pine branches, that burnt so brightly in the center on a hearth of stone.  Well and warmly, too, had he slept on the bedsteads of snow, that these small northern men find so comfortable, when they have strewn them with a thick layer of pine boughs, and covered them with an abundant supply of deerskins.  And then the lights of the north—­the lovely Aurora, with its glowing hues of crimson and yellow and violet!  When this beauteous phenomena was gleaming in the horizon, and shooting up its spires of colored light far into the deep blue sky, bow ardently did Henrich desire the presence of his sister—­of his Edith who used to share his every feeling, and sympathize in all him love and reverence for the works of God!  But in all those days and months and years that elapsed between the time when we left Henrich in the hunting-grounds of the west, and the time to which we have now carried him, Oriana had been a sister—­yes, more than a sister-to him; and she had learnt to think as he thought, and to feel as he felt, till he used to tell her that he almost fancied the spirit of Edith had passed into her form, and had come to share his exile.