St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his hands in silent horror.
The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The subdued Kentuckian sprang to her side; but, with scorn on her lip and the flush of exertion already vanished from her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid strides took her way alone down the mountain.
Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the sheltered river of boyhood; had encountered the storms of a first entrance into life; had trimmed my boat, shortened sail, and with a sharp eye to windward, was laying fairly on my course. Among others from whom I had parted company, was Paul St. John, who had shaken hands with me at the university-gate, leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in doubt as to his real character and history as the first day we met. I had never heard him speak of either father or mother; nor had he, to my knowledge, received a letter from the day of his matriculation. He passed his vacation at the university. He had studied well, yet refused one of the highest college-honors offered him with his degree. He had shown many good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults; and, all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I knew him clever, accomplished, and conscious of superiority, and my knowledge went no farther.
It was five years from this time, I say, and in the bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgotten there was such a being in the world. Late in the month of October, in 1829, I was on my way westward, giving myself a vacation from the law. I embarked on a clear and delicious day in the small steamer which plies up and down the Cayuga Lake, looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring little who were to be my fellow passengers. As we got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight of a group of Indians standing motionless by the wheel. They were chiefs returning from a diplomatic visit to Washington.
I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding through. The first severe frost had come, and the miraculous change had passed upon the leaves, which is known only in America. The blood-red sugar-maple, with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian's lip, stood here and there in the forest like the sultan's standard in a host, the solitary and far-seen aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spirit-like and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer, turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fan-like catalpa, flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun, spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dies like a stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about him to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward in the dying forest, burdening every breeze with its complainings; the hickory, paled through its enduring green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash flushed with a sanguine glory in the unobstructed sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the sybarite of vegetation, stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of Indian shell was never more delicately teinted; the still deeper-died vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing with the nobler things whose summer they had shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this universal decay, outlaws from nature, stood the fir and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads, darker and less lovely than ever in contrast with the death-struck glory of their companions.
The dull colors of English autumnal foliage, give you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon. The change here, too, is gradual. In America it is the work of a night—of a single frost! Ah, to have seen the sun set on hills, bright in the still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the morning to a spectacle like this! It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold, purple and crimson—had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf in those countless trees had been painted to outflush the tulip—as if, by some electric miracle, the dies of the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals and ore, her sapphires, hyacinths and rubies, had let forth their imprisoned dies to mount through the roots of the forest, and like the angels that in olden time entered the bodies of the dying, reanimate the perishing leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.
I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled, when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder.
"St. John? Impossible!"
"Bodily!" answered my quondam classmate.