The smile of God himself that solitary ray appeared to the diseased spirit of the youth, and he grew strong in an instant.  Talk of the lessons of the learned, and the reasonings of the sage!—­a vagrant breeze, a rippling water, a glance of the sweet sunlight, have more of consolation in them for the sad heart than all the pleadings of philosophy.  They bring the missives of a higher teacher.

Bunce was an active coadjutor with the lawyer in this melancholy case.  He made all inquiries—­he went everywhere.  He searched in all places, and spared no labor; but at length despaired.  Nothing could be elicited by his inquiries, and he ceased to hope himself, and ceased to persuade Ralph into hope.  The lawyer shook his head in reply to all questions, and put on a look of mystery which is the safety-valve to all swollen pretenders.

In this state of affairs, taking the horse of the youth, with a last effort at discoveries, Bunce rode forth into the surrounding country.  He had heretofore taken all the common routes, to which, in his previous intercourse with the people, he had been accustomed; he now determined to strike into a path scarcely perceptible, and one which he never remembered to have seen before.  He followed, mile after mile, its sinuosities.  It was a wild, and, seemingly, an untrodden region.  The hills shot up jaggedly from the plain around him—­the fissures were rude and steep—­more like embrasures, blown out by sudden power from the solid rock.  Where the forest appeared, it was dense and intricate—­abounding in brush and underwood; where it was deficient, the blasted heath chosen by the witches in Macbeth would have been no unfit similitude.

Hopeless of human presence in this dreary region, the pedler yet rode on, as if to dissipate the unpleasant thoughts, following upon his frequent disappointment.  Suddenly, however, a turn in the winding path brought him in contact with a strange-looking figure, not more than five feet in height, neither boy nor man, uncouthly habited, and seemingly one to whom all converse but that of the trees and rocks, during his whole life, had been unfamiliar.

The reader has already heard something of the Cherokee pony—­it was upon one of these animals he rode.  They are a small, but compactly made and hardy creature—­of great fortitude, stubborn endurance, and an activity, which, in the travel of day after day, will seldom subside from the gallop.  It was the increasing demand for these animals that had originally brought into existence and exercise a company, which, by a transition far from uncommon, passed readily from the plundering of horses to the cutting of throats and purses; scarcely discriminating in their reckless rapacity between the several degrees of crime in which such a practice involved them.