I passed a fearful time.”
The artifice by which Ruth quiets the suspicion of Mogg Megone, roused by the sight of her tearful eye and heaving bosom, is as remarkable for shrewdness as for poetic beauty:
“Is the sachem angry—angry with Ruth
Because she cries with an ache in her tooth
Which would make a Sagamore jump and cry
And look about with a woman’s eye?”
The same weak and unskilful hand is visible in the characters of Mogg Megone, John Bonython, and Father Rasle, the Jesuit missionary. The descriptive portions of Mogg Megone are disfigured by mere rhetoric and what critics call “nonsense-verses.” As Mogg Megone and John Bonython are stealing through the wood, they hear a sound:
“Hark! is that the angry howl
Of the wolf the hills among,
Or the hooting of the owl