“You should hear a nor-wester breathe, girl, if you fancy wind aloft.  Now, where are your gales, and hurricanes, and trades, and levanters, and such like incidents, in this bit of a forest?  And what fishes have you swimming beneath yonder tame surface?”

“That there have been tempests here, these signs around us plainly show; and beasts, if not fishes, are beneath those leaves.”

“I do not know that,” returned the uncle, with a sailor’s dogmatism.  “They told us many stories at Albany of the wild animals we should fall in with, and yet we have seen nothing to frighten a seal.  I doubt if any of your inland animals will compare with a low latitude shark.”

“See!” exclaimed the niece, who was more occupied with the sublimity and beauty of the “boundless wood” than with her uncle’s arguments; “yonder is a smoke curling over the tops of the trees —­ can it come from a house?”

“Ay, ay; there is a look of humanity in that smoke,” returned the old seaman, “which is worth a thousand trees.  I must show it to Arrowhead, who may be running past a port without knowing it.  It is probable there is a caboose where there is a smoke.”

As he concluded, the uncle drew a hand from his bosom, touched the male Indian, who was standing near him, lightly on the shoulder, and pointed out a thin line of vapor which was stealing slowly out of the wilderness of leaves, at a distance of about a mile, and was diffusing itself in almost imperceptible threads of humidity in the quivering atmosphere.  The Tuscarora was one of those noble-looking warriors oftener met with among the aborigines of this continent a century since than to-day; and, while he had mingled sufficiently with the colonists to be familiar with their habits and even with their language, he had lost little, if any, of the wild grandeur and simple dignity of a chief.  Between him and the old seaman the intercourse had been friendly, but distant; for the Indian had been too much accustomed to mingle with the officers of the different military posts he had frequented not to understand that his present companion was only a subordinate.  So imposing, indeed, had been the quiet superiority of the Tuscarora’s reserve, that Charles Cap, for so was the seaman named, in his most dogmatical or facetious moments, had not ventured on familiarity in an intercourse which had now lasted more than a week.  The sight of the curling smoke, however, had struck the latter like the sudden appearance of a sail at sea; and, for the first time since they met, he ventured to touch the warrior, as has been related.