The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish | Page 7

quality and beauty, than
from its extent. Many such places offered themselves, between the
settlements of Weathersfield and Hartford, and that imaginary line
which separated the possessions of the colony he had quitted, from
those of the one he joined. He made his location, as it is termed in the
language of the country, near the northern boundary of the latter. This
spot, by the aid of an expenditure that might have been considered
lavish for the country and the age, if some lingering of taste, which
even the self-denying and subdued habits of his later life had not
entirely extinguished, and of great natural beauty in the distribution of
land, water and wood, the emigrant contrived to convert into an abode,
that was not more desirable for its retirement from the temptations of
the world, than for its rural loveliness.
After this memorable act of conscientious self-devotion, years passed
away in quiet, amid a species of negative prosperity. Rumors from the
old world reached the ears of the tenants of this secluded settlement,

months after the events to which they referred were elsewhere forgotten,
and tumults and wars in the sister colonies came to their knowledge
only at distant and tardy intervals. In the mean time, the limits of the
colonial establishments were gradually extending themselves, and
valleys were beginning to be cleared nearer and nearer to their own.
Old age had now begun to make some visible impression on the iron
frame of the Captain, and the fresh color of youth and health, with
which his son had entered the forest, was giving way to the brown
covering produced by exposure and toil. We say of toil, for,
independently of the habits and opinions of the country, which strongly
reprobated idleness, even in those most gifted by fortune, the daily
difficulties of their situation, the chase, and the long and intricate
passages that the veteran himself was compelled to adventure in the
surrounding forest, partook largely of the nature of the term we have
used. Ruth continued blooming and youthful, though maternal anxiety
was soon added to her other causes of care. Still, for a long season,
nought occurred to excite extraordinary regrets for the step they had
taken, or to create particular uneasiness in behalf of the future. The
borderers, for such by their frontier position they had in truth become,
heard the strange and awful tidings of the dethronement of one king, of
the interregnum, as a reign of more than usual vigor and prosperity is
called, and of the restoration of the son of him who is strangely enough
termed a martyr. To all these eventful and unwonted chances in the
fortunes of kings, Mark Heathcote listened with deep and reverential
submission to the will of him, in whose eyes crowns and sceptres are
merely the more costly baubles of the world. Like most of his
contemporaries, who had sought shelter in the western continent, his
political opinions, if not absolutely republican, had a leaning to liberty
that was strongly in opposition to the doctrine of the divine rights of the
monarch, while he had been too far removed from the stirring passions
which had gradually excited those nearer to the throne, to lose their
respect for its sanctity, and to sully its brightness with blood. When the
transient and straggling visiters that, at long intervals, visited his
settlement, spoke of the Protector, who for so many years ruled
England with an iron hand, the eyes of the old man would gleam with
sudden and singular interest; and once, when commenting after evening
prayer on the vanity and the vicissitudes of this life, he acknowledged

that the extraordinary individual, who was, in substance if not in name,
seated on the throne of the Plantagenets, had been the boon companion
and ungodly associate of many of his youthful hours. Then would
follow a long, wholesome, extemporaneous homily on the idleness of
setting the affections on the things of life, and a half-suppressed, but
still intelligible commendation of the wiser course which had led him
to raise his own tabernacle in the wilderness, instead of weakening the
chances of eternal glory by striving too much for the possession of the
treacherous vanities of the world.
But even the gentle and ordinarily little observant Ruth might trace the
kindling of the eye, the knitting of the brow, and the flushings of his
pale and furrowed cheek, as the murderous conflicts of the civil wars
became the themes of the ancient soldier's discourse. There were
moments when religious submission, and we had almost said religious
precepts, were partially forgotten, as he explained to his attentive son
and listening grandchild, the nature of the onset, or the quality and
dignity of the retreat. At such times, his still nervous hand would even