The courteous manners which both Helen and her husband had acquired in early life—­when they dwelt in comparative affluence in England—­were inherited by their daughter in full measure; and her whole manner and conduct were marked by a refinement and elegance that seemed little in keeping with the life of extreme simplicity, and even of hardship, that she had experienced from her early childhood.  While her brothers were spared to her, she was their constant companion and playfellow; and except when her mother required her attendance, either as her pupil or her assistant in domestic occupations, she spent the greatest part of the day in rambling with them on the sea-shore, or through the adjacent woods, or else in the active and tasteful cultivation of their garden.  And when successive calamities deprived her of these cherished objects of her early affection, she still continued to wander to the spots where they had played and conversed together, under the guardianship of the faithful Fingal; and, with no companion but the powerful and sagacious animal, she was even permitted to ramble through the woods as far as the Wampanoge village, and divert her sorrowful thoughts in the society of Apannow, and her lively little son Nepea.

But after the sad day when Edith wept on the lifeless body of her favorite Fingal, and saw him laid in the grave that was dug for him beneath the great tulip-tree, she seemed to concentrate her affections on the bower that Henrich had erected, and the plants that he and Ludovico had transplanted from the forest to cover its trellised walls, and to decorate the garden that surrounded it.  Many of these were again removed, and planted on Fingal’s grave; and there—­on a seat that her brother had constructed—­would Edith sit, hour after hour, either buried in contemplations of the past and the future, or else devouring with avidity the few books that her parents possessed, or that she could procure from their friends and neighbors.  She formed no intimacy with any of her own young countrywomen.  They were too unlike herself—­they had generally known no sorrow:  or, if it had fallen on them, its strokes had not made a like impression on their characters; and Edith could find no consolation or pleasure in their society.  So she lived alone with her own spirit, and indulged her own high aspirations; and none but Helen was the confidant of any of her thoughts and imaginings.  Many of them she kept within her own breast, for she felt that it would distress her mother to know how little charm remained to her in life, and how often she looked up into the blue depths of heaven, and wished that she had ‘the wings of a dove, and could flee away’ from this cold world, ‘and be at rest’ where Henrich and Ludovico dwelt.