The Pathfinder; Or, The Inland Sea
blue water, your rollers, your breakers, your whales, or your waterspouts, and your endless motion, in this bit of a forest, child?”      

       “And where are your tree-tops, your solemn silence, your fragrant leaves, and your beautiful green, uncle, on the ocean?”      

       “Tut, Magnet! if you understood the thing, you would know that green water is a sailor's bane. He scarcely relishes a greenhorn less.”      

       “But green trees are a different thing. Hist! that sound is the air breathing among the leaves!”      

       “You should hear a nor-wester breathe, girl, if you fancy wind aloft. Now, where are your gales, and hurricanes, and trades, and levanters, and such like incidents, in this bit of a forest? And what fishes have you swimming beneath yonder tame surface?”      

       “That there have been tempests here, these signs around us plainly show; and beasts, if not fishes, are beneath those leaves.”      

       “I do not know that,” returned the uncle, with a sailor's dogmatism. “They told us many stories at Albany of the wild animals we should fall in with, and yet we have seen nothing to frighten a seal. I doubt if any of your inland animals will compare with a low latitude shark.”      

       “See!” exclaimed the niece, who was more occupied with the sublimity and beauty of the “boundless wood” than with her uncle's arguments; “yonder is a smoke curling over the tops of the trees—can it come from a house?”      

       “Ay, ay; there is a look of humanity in that smoke,” returned the old seaman, “which is worth a thousand trees. I must show it to Arrowhead, who may be running past a port without knowing it. It is probable there is a caboose where there is a smoke.”      

       As he concluded, the uncle drew a hand from his bosom, touched the male Indian, who was standing near him, lightly on the shoulder, and pointed out a thin line of vapor which was stealing slowly out of the wilderness of leaves, at a distance of about a mile, and was diffusing itself in almost imperceptible threads of humidity in the quivering atmosphere. The Tuscarora was one of those noble-looking warriors oftener met with among the aborigines of this continent a century since than to-day; 
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