And did she, who by her fickleness, had brought so much woe to the hearts that loved her-did she live happy after these disastrous events? Alas! poor girl! a melancholy took possession of her heart-her home became wearisome, and she urged her husband to take her, as he had promised, to the city where he lived. He was extremely reluctant to go, and sought, by many an evasion, to remain where he was. However, he at last could not avoid it, and left the peaceful valleys of Vermont.

every one but she whom it would touch the most, | sank slowly back in her bed. Elizabeth sprang to knew the loss of the gentle Theodore, and a senti- her, but her spirit had gone to join her Theodore in ment of sorrow pervaded every heart. In the heaven. meanwhile, Mrs. Howard left her friend's house, and slowly took her way homeward. As she passed through the village, every one she met seemed very gloomy, and when she spoke smilingly to them, they gazed earnestly and piteously at her, or turned hastily away. Still, much occupied with her own thoughts, she scarcely observed this, but arrived at her home, with a more serene heart than she had known for some time. The next day the poor mother was informed of her loss, and, for an hour after the fatal intelligence, sat, with her hands clasped together, and her head bowed down on her breast, without speaking. Her kind neighbors succeeded in placing her in bed, from which she never rose again. Elizabeth stationed herself by her bedside, where she nursed her night and day. The sorrowing woman seldom spoke-never inquired the particulars of her son's death-but lay silently weeping with the bitterness a lonely and bereaved mother alone can feel. “Oh, Elizabeth,” said she one day, "to think my boy, my beautiful Theodore, is lying far down in the bottom of the lake, among the cold waves! If he could only be buried by his father's side, I could bear it better." "Be comforted then, my dear Mrs. Howard. Mr. Graham has offered a large sum for the recovery of the body, and all the town has turned out in search of him."

"And I spoke harsh to him, Lizzy, on that very morning! Oh, that cuts me to the heart! I blamed him for indulging in sorrow. Little did I know that was the last day of his life! Oh, if I had not spoken so harsh to him! Lizzy, if I had not uttered those cruel words to my own, kind, gentle boy!"

Elizabeth did all in her power to alleviate the sorrows of the broken-hearted mother-but in vain. Her spark of life was fast waning, and she laid motionless in her bed, seemingly only waiting to hear her son's body was found. Melancholy were the sensations of Elizabeth, while she sat, day after day, in that darkened room, and reflected on the misery her faithlessness had brought on that sorrowing mother; and in the depth of her wretchedness, she even wished she had never seen the young stranger.

On the ninth day after the loss of young Howard, the booming sound of cannon was heard at intervals, which were fired over the lake, in hopes this might effect the raising of the body. The dying mother lay to all appearance insensible, but with the sound of the cannon, a deep shudder would convulse her limbs, and show that life still lingered. The shores of the lake were lined with anxious spectators-boats were stationed around, and every endeavor was used to recover their young towns

man.

Just at dusk, Elizabeth heard the slow tramp of many feet approaching the house. They stopped, and she crept softly out. Her husband stood in the entry. "The body is found," said he, in a low

tone.

Elizabeth stole back to the room, and saw Mrs. Howard sitting up in bed. "Is that my poor boy?" Elizabeth answered in the affirmative: the mother clasped her hands, raised her eyes to heaven, and

When arrived at the great city, Graham was forced to disclose to his wife that his only means of maintaining her was by the stage-that he was on his way to Montreal, seeking an engagement, when an acquaintance offered to defray his expenses, if he would look after some lands of his in Vermont. Elizabeth was thunderstruck. She had always been taught by her homely relatives, that the theatre was (as her plain-spoken father called it) the devil's house; and this, with the straightened means of her husband, preyed on her spirits and altered her temper. Her husband saw he had lost her confidence, and sought for friends and happiness away from home, where he once again plunged into that dissipated way of life which he once hoped he had forsworn forever. Elizabeth, in the lonely hours she now so frequently experienced, reviewed her past life, and bitterly regretted that she had thrown from her, so recklessly, the pure and faithful heart of Theodore. A few years passed, and by the sudden death of her husband, Elizabeth was left alone and penniless, in a large and unknown city; but by raising a little money from the work of her hands, she succeeded in once more attaining the shade of her native valleys, where she threw herself and three children on the charity of her father. The peace she once knew here, was her's no more, for the remaining days of the lonely widow were worn away in care and discontent, and vain repining after the lost friend of her early youth.

E. R. S.

The Mariner's Welcome.

Оn, speed thee on, Oh, speed thee on,
Across the deep blue tide!
Never did bark so swift and true

On ocean's bosom ride.

Yonder I see our hills of green,
Yonder our sea-girt plain;
We'll revel to-night till the moon's gray light
Shall illumine the East again.

The gallant barque has made the shore,
And they welcome back the brave,
Who've nobly fought their country's cause,
Across the ocean wave.

And the feast is spread o'er the hills of green,
For the sons of the stormy sea;

And the Moon's bright ray prolongs her stay,
In smiles and revelry.

down to future ages a deep lesson-a moral interest lasting as itself-however the aspect of things and the conditions of people change around it. Henceforth no man shall gaze on it with careless eye; but earth shall whisper to his own bosom"What is stronger than love in a mother's heart? what more fearful than power wielded by ignorance ?-or what more lamentable than the abuse of a beneficent name to purposes of selfish cru

THE monuments which human art has raised to human pride or power may decay with that power, or survive to mock that pride; but sooner or later they perish their place knows them not. In the aspect of a ruin, however imposing in itself, and however magnificent or dear the associations connected with it, there is always something sad and humiliating, reminding us how poor and how frail are the works of man, how unstable his hopes, and how limited his capacity compared to his aspira-elty ?" tions! But when man has made to himself monu

Those vast regions which occupy the central ments of the works of God; when the memory of part of South America, stretching from Guinea to human affections, human intellect, human power, the foot of the Andes, overspread with gigantic and is blended with the immutable features of nature, primeval forests, and watered by mighty rivers they consecrate each other, and both endure those solitary wilds where man appears unessential together to the end. In a state of high civilization, in the scale of creation, and the traces of his man trusts to the record of brick and marble-the pyramid, the column, the temple, the tomb:— "Then the bust

And altar rise-then sink again to dust."

power are few and far between-have lately occupied much of the attention of Europeans; partly from the extraordinary events and unexpected revolutions; which have convulsed the nations round them; and partly from the researches of

In the earlier stages of society, the isolated rock-enterprising travellers who have penetrated into the mountain, cloud-encircled-the river, rolling to their remotest districts. But till within the last its ocean-home-the very stars themselves-were twenty years these wild regions have been unendued with sympathies, and constituted the first, known, except through the means of the Spanish as they will be the last, witnesses and records of and Portuguese priests, settled as missionaries our human destinies and feelings. The glories of along the banks of the Orinoco and the Paraguay. the Parthenon shall fade into oblivion; but while The men thus devoted to utter banishment from all the heights of Thermopyla stand, and while a intercourse with civilized life, are generally Franwave murmurs in the gulph of Salamis, a voice ciscan or Capuchin friars, born in the Spanish shall cry aloud to the universe-"Freedom and Colonies. Their pious duties are sometimes volunglory to those who can dare to die!-woe and ever-tary, and sometimes imposed by the superiors of lasting infamy to him who would enthral the un- their order; in either case their destiny appear at conquerable spirit!" The Coliseum with its san- first view deplorable, and their self-sacrifice subguinary trophies is crumbling to decay; but the lime; yet, when we recollect that these poor monks islet of Nisida, where Brutus parted with his Portia, generally exchanged the monotonous solitude of the steep of Leucadia, still remain fixed as the the cloister for the magnificent loneliness of the foundations of the earth; and lasting as the round boundless woods and far-spreading savannahs, the world itself shall be the memories that hover over sacrifice appears less terrible; even where accomthem! As long as the waters of the Hellespont panied by suffering, privation, and occasionally flow between Sestos and Abydos, the fame of the by danger. When these men combine with their love that perished there shall never pass away. A religious zeal some degree of understanding and traveller, pursuing his weary way through the enlightened benevolence, they have been enabled midst of an African desert-a barren, desolate, and to enlarge the sphere of knowledge and civilization, almost boundless solitude-found a gigantic sculp- by exploring the productions and geography of tured head, shattered and half-buried in the sand; these unknown regions; and by collecting into and near it the fragment of a pedestal, on which villages and humanizing the manners of the native these words might be with pain deciphered: I am tribes, who seem strangely to unite the fiercest and Ozymandias, King of kings; look upon my works, most abhorred traits of savage life, with some of ye mighty ones, and despair!" Who was Ozyman- the gentlest instincts of our common nature. But dias ?-where are now his works?—what bond of when it has happened that these priests have been thought or feeling, links his past with our present? men of narrow minds and tyrannical tempers, The Arab, with his beasts of burthen, tramples they have on some occasions fearfully abused the unheeding over these forlorn vestiges of human authority entrusted to them; and being removed art and human grandeur. In the wildest part of the many thousand miles from the European settleNew Continent, hidden amid the depths of inter-ments and the restraint of the laws, the power they minable forests, there stands a huge rock, hallowed have exercised has been as far beyond control as the by a tradition so recent that the man is not yet grey- calamities they have caused have been beyond all headed who was born its contemporary; but that remedy and all relief. rock, and the tale which consecrates it, shall carry

Unfortunately for those who were trusted to his

charge, Father Gomez was a missionary of this character. He was a Franciscan friar of the order of Observance, and he dwelt in the village of San Fernando, near the source of the Orinoco, whence his authority extended as president over several missions in the neighborhood of which San Fernando was the capital. The temper of this man was naturally cruel and despotic; he was wholly uneducated, and had no idea, no feeling, of the true spirit of christian benevolence: in this respect, the savages whom he had been sent to instruct and civilize were in reality less savage and less ignorant than himself.

laughing and crowing with all the archness of young children.

Their food being nearly prepared, the Indian woman looked towards the river, impatient for the return of her husband. But her bright dark eyes, swimming with eagerness and affectionate solicitude, became fixed and glazed with terror when, instead of him she so fondly expected, she beheld the attendants of Father Gomez, creeping stealthily along the side of the thicket towards her cabin. Instantly aware of her danger (for the nature and object of these incursions were the dread of all the country round) she uttered a piercing shriek, Among the passions and vices which Father snatched up her infants in her arms, and, calling Gomez had brought from his cell in the convent of on the other to follow, rushed from the hut towards Angostara, to spread contamination and oppression the forest. As she had considerably the start of through his new domain, were pride and avarice; her pursuers, she would probably have escaped, and both were interested in increasing the number and have hidden herself effectually in its tangled of his converts, or rather, of his slaves. In spite depths, if her precious burthen had not impeded of the wise and humane law of Charles the Third, her flight; but thus encumbered she was easily prohibiting the conversion of the Indian natives overtaken. Her eldest child, fleet of foot, and by force, Gomez, like others of his brethren in the wily as the young jaguar, escaped to carry to the more distant missions, often accomplished his wretched father the news of his bereavement, and purpose by direct violence. He was accustomed neither father nor child were ever more beheld in to go, with a party of his people, and lie in wait their former haunts. near the hordes of unreclaimed Indians: when the men were absent he would forcibly seize on the women and children, bind them, and bring them off in triumph to his village. There, being baptized and taught to make the sign of the cross, they were called Christians, but in reality were slaves. In general, the women thus detained pined away and died; but the children became accustomed to their new mode of life, forgot their woods, and paid to their Christian master a willing and blind obedience; thus in time they became the oppressors of their own people. There Guahiba and her infants were placed in Father Gomez called these incursions la conquista a hut under the guard of two Indians; some food espiritual-the conquest of souls.

One day he set off on an expedition of this nature, attended by twelve armed Indians; and after rowing some leagues up the river Guaviare, which flows into the Orinoco, they perceived, through an opening in the trees, and at a little distance from the shore, an Indian hut. It is the custom of these people to live isolated in families; and so strong is their passion for solitude, that when collected into villages they frequently build themselves a little cabin at a distance from their usual residence, and retire to it, at certain seasons, for days together. The cabin of which I speak was one of these solitary villas—if I may so apply the word. It was constructed with peculiar neatness, thatched with palm leaves, and overshadowed with cocoa trees and laurels; it stood alone in the wilderness, embowered in luxuriant vegetation, and looked like the chosen abode of simple and quiet happiness. Within this hut a young Indian woman (whom I shall call Guahiba, from the name of her tribe) was busied in making cakes of the cavassa root, and preparing the family meal, against the return of her husband, who was fishing at some distance up the river; her eldest child, about five or six years old, assisted her; and from time to time, while thus employed, the mother turned her eyes, beaming with fond affection, upon the playful gambols of two little infants, who, being just able to crawl alone, were rolling together on the ground,

Meantime, the Indians seized upon Guahibabound her, tied her two children together, and dragged her down to the river, where Father Gomez was sitting in his canoe, waiting the issue of the expedition. At the sight of the captives his eyes sparkled with a cruel triumph; he thanked his patron saint that three more souls were added to his community; and then, heedless of the tears of the mother, and the cries of her children, he commanded his followers to row back with all speed to San Fernando.

was given to her, which she at first refused, but afterwards, as if on reflection, accepted. A young Indian girl was then sent to her-a captive convert of her own tribe, who had not yet quite forgotten her native language. She tried to make Guahiba comprehend that in this village she and her children must remain during the rest of their lives, in order that they might go to heaven after they were dead. Guahiba listened, but understood nothing of what was addressed to her; nor could she be made to conceive for what purpose she was torn from her husband and her home, nor why she was to dwell for the remainder of her life among a strange people, and against her will. During that night she remained tranquil, watching over her infants as they slumbered by her side; but the moment the dawn appeared she took them in her arms and ran off to the woods. She was immediately brought back; but no sooner were the eyes of her keepers turned from her than she snatched up her children, and again fled;-again-and again! At every new attempt she was punished with more and more severity; she was kept from food, and at length repeatedly and cruelly beaten. In vain!apparently she did not even understand why she was thus treated; and one instinctive idea alone, the desire of escape, seenied to possess her mind and govern all her movements. If her oppressors only turned from her, or looked another way for an instant, she invariably caught up her children and

ran off towards the forest. Father Gomez was at long, interwoven grass. There, crouching and length wearied by what he termed her "blind trembling in her lair, she heard the voices of her obstinacy;" and, as the only means of securing all persecutors halloeing to each other through the three, he took measures to separate the mother thicket. She would probably have escaped but for from her children, and resolved to convey Guahiba a large mastiff which the Indians had with them, to a distant mission, whence she should never find and which scented her out in her hiding place. her way back either to them or to her home. The moment she heard the dreaded animal souffing in the air, and tearing his way through the grass, she knew she was lost. The Indians came up. She attempted no vain resistance; but, with a sullen passiveness, suffered herself to be seized and dragged to the shore.

In pursuance of this plan, poor Guahiba, with her hands tied behind her, was placed in the bow of a canoe. Father Gomez seated himself at the helm, and they rowed away.

The few travellers who have visited these regions agree in describing a phenomenon, the cause When the merciless priest beheld her, he deterof which is still a mystery to geologists, and which mined to inflict on her such discipline as he thought imparts to the lonely depths of these unappropri- would banish her children from her memory, and ated and unviolated shades an effect intensely and cure her forever of her passion for escaping. He indescribably mournful. The granite rocks which ordered her to be stretched upon that granite rock, border the river, and extend far into the contiguous where she had landed from the canoe, on the sumwoods, assume strange, fantastic shapes, and are mit of which she had stood, as if exulting in her covered with a black incrustation, or deposit, flight,,—THE ROCK OF THE MOTHER, as it has ever which contrasted with the snow-white foam of the since been denominated-and there flogged till waves breaking on them below, and the pale lich-she could scarcely move or speak. She was then ens which spring from their crevices, and creep bound more securely, placed in the canoe, and caralong their surface above, give these shores an as-ried to Javita, the seat of a mission far up the pect perfectly funereal. Between these melan- river.

large barn-like building, which served as a place of worship, a public magazine, and occasionally, as a barrack. Father Gomez ordered two or three Indians of Javita to keep guard over her alternately, relieving each other through the night; and then went to repose himself after the fatigues of his voyage. As the wretched captive neither resisted nor complained, Father Gomez flattered himself that she was now reduced to submission. Little could he fathom the bosom of this fond mother! He mistook for stupor, or resignation, the calmness of a fixed resolve. In absence, in bonds, and in torture, her heart throbbed with but one feeling; one thought alone possessed her whole soul:-her children-her children-and still her children!

choly rocks-so high and so steep that a landing- It was near sunset when they arrived at this vilplace seldom occurred for leagues together-the lage, and the inhabitants were preparing to go to canoe of Father Gomez slowly glided, though rest. Guahiba was deposited for the night in a urged against the stream by eight robust Indians. The unhappy Guahiba sat at first perfectly unmoved, and apparently ainazed and stunned by her situation; she did not comprehend what they were going to do with her; but after a while she looked up towards the sun, then down upon the stream and perceiving, by the direction of the one and the course of the other, that every stroke of the oar carried her farther and farther from her beloved and helpless children, her husband, and her native home, her countenance was seen to change and assume a fearful expression. As the possibility of escape, in her present situation, had never once occurred to her captors, she had been very slightly and carelessly bound. She watched her opportunity, burst the withes on her arms, with a sudden effort flung herself overboard, and dived under the waves; but in another moment she rose again at a considerable distance, and swam to the shore. The current, being rapid and strong, carried her down to the base of a dark granite rock which projected into the stream; she climbed it with fearless agility, stood for an instant on its summit, looking down upon her tyrants, then plunged into the forest, and was lost to the sight.

Father Gomez, beholding his victim thus unexpectedly escape him, sat mute and thunderstruck for some moments, unable to give utterance to the extremity of his rage and astonishment. When, at length, he found voice, he commanded his Indians to pull with all their might to the shore; then to pursue the poor fugitive, and bring her back to him, dead or alive.

Guahiba, meantime, while strength remained to break her way through the tangled wilderness, continued her flight; but soon exhausted and breathless, with the violence of her exertions, she was obliged to relax in her efforts, and at length sunk down at the foot of a huge laurel tree, where she concealed herself as well as she might, among the

Among the Indians appointed to watch her was a youth about eighteen or nineteen years of age, bruised by the stripes she had received, and that who, perceiving that her arms were miserably she suffered the most acute agony from the savage tightness with which the cords were drawn, let fall an exclamation of pity in the language of her tribe. Quick she seized the moment of feeling, and addressed him as one of her people.

"Guahiba," she said, in a whispered tone, "thou speakest my language, and doubtless thou art my brother! Wilt thou see me perish without pity, O son of my people? Ah, cut these bonds which enter into my flesh! I faint with pain! I die !"

The young man heard, and, as if terrified, removed a few paces from her and kept silence. Afterwards, when his companions were out of sight, and he was left alone to watch, he approached and said, "Guahiba!—our fathers were the same, and I may not see thee die; but if I cut these bonds, white man will flog me: wilt thou be content if I loosen them, and give thee ease?" And as he spoke, he stooped and loosened the thongs on her