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.

"Guahibo," 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 wrists and arms; she smiled upon him languidly, and appeared satisfied.

Night was now coming on. Guahiba dropped her head on her bosom, and closed her eyes, as if exhausted by weariness. The young Indian, believing that she slept, after some hesitation laid himself down on his mat. His companions were already slumbering in the porch of the building, and all was still.

Then Guahiba raised her head. It was night-dark night -without moon or star. There was no sound, except the breathing of the sleepers around her, and the humming of the mosquitoes. She listened for some time with her whole soul; but all was silence. She then gnawed the loosened thongs asunder with her teeth. Her hands once free, she released her feet; and when the morning came she had disappeared. Search was made for her in every direction, but in vain; and Father Gomez, baffled and wrathful, returned to his village.

The distance between Javita and San Fernando, where Guahiba had left her infants, is twenty-five leagues in a straight line. A fearful wilderness of gigantic forest trees, and intermingling underwood, separated these two missions;—a savage

and awful solitude, which, probably, since the beginning of the world, had never been trodden by human foot. All communication was carried on by the river; and there lived not a man, whether Indian or European, bold enough to have attempted the route along the shore. It was the commencement of the rainy season. The sky, obscured by clouds, seldom revealed the sun by day, and neither moon nor gleam of twinkling star by night. The rivers had overflowed, and the lowlands were inundated. There was no visible object to direct the traveller; no shelter, no defence, no aid, no guide. Was it Providence was it the strong instinct of maternal love, which led this courageous woman through the depths of the pathless woods-where rivulets, swollen to torrents by the rains, intercepted her at every step; where the thorny lianas, twining from tree to tree, opposed an almost impenetrable barrier; where the mosquitoes hung in clouds upon her path; where the jaguar and the alligator lurked to devour her; where the rattle-snake and the water-serpent lay coiled up in the damp grass, ready to spring at her; where she had no food to support her exhausted frame, but a few berries, and the large black ants which build their nests on the trees? How directed-how sustained-cannot be told: the poor woman herself could not tell. All that can be known with any certainty is, that the fourth rising sun beheld her at San Fernando; a wild, and wasted, and fearful object; her feet swelled and bleeding her hands torn-her body covered with wounds, and emaciated with famine and fatigue;-but once more near her children!

For several hours she hovered round the hut in which she had left them, gazing on it from a distance with longing eyes and a sick heart, without daring to advance: at length she perceived that all the inhabitants had quitted their cottages to attend vespers; then she stole from the thicket, and approached, with faint and timid steps, the spot which contained her heart's treasures. She entered, and found her infants left alone, and playing together on a mat: they screamed at her

appearance, so changed was she by suffering; but when she called them by name, they knew her tender voice, and stretched out their little arms towards her. In that moment, the mother forgot all she had endured-all her anguish, all her fears, everything on earth but the objects which blessed her eyes. She sat down between her children-she took them on her knees-she clasped them in an agony of fondness to her bosom -she covered them with kisses-she shed torrents of tears on their little heads, as she hugged them to her. Suddenly she remembered where she was, and why she was there: new terrors seized her; she rose up hastily, and, with her babies in her arms, she staggered out of the cabin-fainting, stumbling, and almost blind with loss of blood and inanition. She tried to reach the woods, but too feeble to sustain her burthen, which yet she would not relinquish, her limbs trembled, and sank beneath her. At this moment an Indian, who was watching the public oven, perceived her. He gave the alarm by ringing a bell, and the people rushed forth, gathering round Guahiba with fright and astonishment. They gazed upon her as if upon an apparition, till her sobs, and imploring looks, and trembling and wounded limbs, convinced them that she yet lived, though apparently nigh to death. They looked upon her in silence, and then at each other; their savage bosoms were touched with commiseration for her sad plight, and with admiration, and even awe, at this unexampled heroism of maternal love.

While they hesitated, and none seemed willing to seize her, or to take her children from her, Father Gomez, who had just landed on his return from Javita, approached in haste, and commanded them to be separated. Guahiba clasped her children closer to her breast, and the Indians shrunk back.

"What!" thundered the monk, "will ye suffer this woman to steal two precious souls from heaven?-two members from our community? See ye not, that while she is suffered to approach them, there is no salvation for either mother or children?-part them, and instantly!"

The Indians, accustomed to his ascendancy, and terrified at his voice, tore the children of Guahiba once more from her feeble arms: she uttered nor word nor cry, but sunk in a swoon upon the earth.

While in this state, Father Gomez, with a cruel mercy, ordered her wounds to be carefully dressed: her arms and legs were swathed with cotton bandages; she was then placed in a canoe, and conveyed to a mission, far, far off, on the river Esmeralda, beyond the Upper Orinoco. She continued in a state of exhaustion and torpor during the voyage; but after being taken out of the boat and carried inland, restoratives brought her back to life, and to a sense of her situation. When she perceived, as reason and consciousness returned, that she was in a strange place, unknowing how she was brought there—among a tribe who spoke a language different from any she had ever heard before, and from whom, therefore, according to Indian prejudices, she could hope nor aid nor pity;-when she recollected that she was far from her beloved children;—when she saw no means of discovering the bearing or the distance of their abode-no clue to guide her back to it-then, and only then, did the mother's heart yield to utter despair: and thenceforward refusing to speak or to move, and obstinately rejecting all nourishment, thus she died.

The boatman, on the river Atabapo, suspends his oar with a sigh as he passes THE ROCK OF THE MOTHER. He points it out to the traveller, and weeps as he relates the tale of her sufferings and her fate. Ages hence, when these solitary regions have become the seats of civilization, of power, and intelligence; when the pathless wilds, which poor Guahiba traversed in her anguish, are replaced by populous cities, and smiling gardens, and pastures, and waving harvests,-still that dark rock shall stand, frowning o'er the stream; tradition and history shall preserve its name and fame; and when even the pyramids, those vast vain monuments to human pride, have passed away, it shall endure, to carry down to the end of the world the memory of the Indian Mother.

THE STORM-LIGHTS

OF ANZASCA.

BY LEIGH RITCHIE.

THESE lights are wholly different both in appearance and situation from the ignis fatuus. The main road from the Lago Maggiore to the western parts of Switzerland at one time ran through the Valley of Anzasca; and it was once my fortune to be detained all night at a cottage in one of its wildest defiles, by a storm which rendered my horses ungovernable. While leaning upon a bench, and looking with drowsy curiosity towards the window-for there was no bed except my host's, of which I did not choose to deprive him—I saw a small faint light among the rocks in the distance. I at first conceived that it might proceed from a cottage-window; but, remembering that that part of the mountain was wholly uninhabited, and indeed uninhabitable, I roused myself, and, calling one of the family, inquired what it meant. While I spoke, the light suddenly vanished; but in about a minute reappeared in another place, as if the bearer had gone round some intervening rock. The storm at that time raged with a fury which threatened to blow our hut, with its men and horses, over the mountains; and the night was so intensely dark that the edges of the horizon were wholly undistinguishable from the sky.

"There it is again!" said I. "What is that, in the name of God ?"

"It is Lelia's lamp!" cried the young man eagerly, who