[Footnote A: Burning water, ardent spirits, commonly called by them the "fire-eater."]
Again he sunk to sleep, and again he dreamed. Still his dream was of strange creatures, aliens to his land, and usurpers of the rights of its native sons. But they had multiplied till their numbers were as the sands upon the sea shore. He stood in imagination upon a lofty hill, and cast his eyes upon the broad lands beneath him. How changed! The forests had been swept away, the land was cleared of its mossy old oaks, and lofty pines, and cedars, but, where they once raised their leafy heads to the winds of heaven, now rose cabins, white as the folds of a cloud, and glittering in the sun like a sheet of ice in a winter's day. The broad and rapid river, as well as the waters of the Great Lake, was marked in streaks of white foam by the many clouds traversing it, like that he had seen in his first dream. The lofty mountains were seamed like the breast of a tattooed warrior(2), by the roads which the strangers had made over it. The vales waved with the yellow wheat, and, herds of tame bisons lay resting on the grassy knolls, or stood grouped at the outlets of the fields, which the industrious strangers had girded in with fences of rock.
And what had become of the former inhabitants of the soil? where were the dusky men who met the strange creatures upon the shore, and bade them welcome, and gave them the fat things of the sea and the land for their subsistence, and warm furs to protect them from the searching winds of the Snow-Moon, and taught them how to follow the trail of forest animals, and to thread, unerringly, their way for many successive nights through the lonely wilderness, by the flow of streams and the course of fishes, and the light of the Hunter's Star, and the moss upon the oaks, and the flight of birds? Listen, and I will tell you.
He sees upon the edge of a stream, overgrown with a thick grove of alders and luxuriant vines, an Indian man and woman. The woman held in her arms a dying child--at the feet of the man, lay a lean and famished dog. Deep thought was in the eye of the one, and absorbing grief in that of the other. Now the hunter cast his eyes into the depths of the river in anxious search for the signs of the approach of the finny people; now he laid his ear to the earth after the manner of his race, when they would detect the sound of footsteps.