Her dark
eye swam in tears, and the color of her brown cheek deepened, until her
companion saw new reasons to forget his discontent in sympathies, which,
however obtuse they might be, were never entirely dormant.
"If a journey of a few hundred miles be all thou askest, girl, why speak
in parables?" he good-naturedly replied. "The kind word was not wanting to
put me on such a trial. We will be married on the Sabbath, and, please
Heaven, the Wednesday, or the Saturday at most, shall see me on the path
of the western trader."
"No delay. Thou must depart with the sun. The more active thou provest on
the journey the sooner wilt thou have the power to make me repent a
foolish deed."
But Faith had been persuaded to relax a little from this severity. They
were married on the Sabbath, and the following day Content and Dudley left
the valley, in quest of the distant tribe on which the scion of another
stock was said to have been so violently engrafted.
It is needless to dwell on the dangers and privations of such an
expedition. The Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehannah, rivers that
were then better known in tales than to the inhabitants of New-England,
were all crossed; and after a painful and hazardous journey, the
adventurers reached the first of that collection of small interior lakes,
whose banks are now so beautifully decorated with villages and farms.
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