Shakespeare without doubt received many a poetic hint from the noble savage, and most certainly owed to him the story of the Tempest, and the fable of the Pucks, or as the Indians called them Puck-wud-jees—being literally wood-fairies.
The courage and address of Acashee had rendered her the friend and companion of her father, and his attendant upon many a long and perilous march. Among savage tribes intelligence of a strange or interesting character is conveyed by fleet runners, who go from tribe to tribe after the manner of the Highland clans so graphically described by Walter Scott in the “speed, Malise, speed” of his spirited poem. Accordingly, Samoset was one of the first to reach the sea-shore, and look with wonder upon the ship which had come like a rare bird, or superior agent, from the spirit-land. He it was who, fifteen years afterward, hailed the Pilgrims at Plymouth with the words: “Welcome, Englishmen.”
Samoset had been of great service to the colony upon the Saco river, and Sir Richard Vines and family had not failed to treat his daughter Acashee with much consideration. Little Hope more especially singled her out as her favorite friend and companion. She liked her for her beauty, her courage, her strength and activity, combined with an easy gayety rare in the children of the wood, and almost unknown among the anxious and over-taxed pilgrims to the new world.
The artful savage maiden, acute and penetrating, had not failed to perceive the peculiar characteristics of Hope, and had not failed to turn them to account in her own way. She played her game in a manner worthy of her name, of Net-weaver, in the best sense, Spider in its worst. She hinted to the melancholy and superstitious Pilgrim settlers, doubts of her state as a true human being, for the Indians believed in the incarnation of certain malignant beings, no less than the ascetic whites.
To the Indians of the many tribes with whom she and her father were in constant intercourse, she enlarged upon Hope’s gifts as a wonderful medicine-woman, and it was she who had more than once induced them to make attempts to abduct her for purposes of divination.
While our poor Hope was thus constantly under the eye of her wily and malignant companion, she was a source, also, of much solicitude on the part of the parents, who began to feel painfully that evil and cruel thoughts were rife in the minds of their neighbors regarding her, which might end in some tragedy even more distressing than the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom Hope was so fond of associating herself.
Mistress Vines was a cheerful, active, dignified woman, or she would have been sore distressed as the conviction grew upon her that all was not quite right with little Hope. In high courtly or civilized society her peculiarities would not have been observed—the pressure of the same serving to keep its members in equal balance; but in an experience admitting of greater latitude, it became evident that she, the product of a civilized, but bred amidst a primitive, race, had inherited the graces of the one, and absorbed the wild freedom of the other.
Having once obtained the key to the formation of her mind, all its manifestations were complete and harmonious. The study of a book was irksome to her, but that which she learned from the utterance of the human tongue never escaped her memory.
There was a preternatural directness in all the elements of her mind—a wild, vivid adherence to truth under every aspect, which rendered any modification of it, under any circumstances, impossible to her; hence it was followed without the power to anticipate results. It might have been genius—for nothing was impossible to her; and yet, according to ordinary calculations, little was attainable. She would say, “I know it is thus and thus,” but the why it was so it was impossible for her to define.
“Did it ever occur to you, my husband,” asked Mistress Vines, “that there is something in the look of poor little Hope strangely like our brother Raleigh?”