daughter of Alexander Carver, the man who built this house. I was named
after her. That harp was hers, likewise the bed in which you are going
to sleep, Sahwah. She was a young girl at the time of the Revolution,
and her father and both her brothers fought in the war, as well as the
man she was to marry. There is a story about her in Uncle Jasper's
history of the Carver family, how she saved her lover from the Indians.
This valley was the scene of many skirmishes between the Colonial troops
and the Indians, who had taken sides with the British. He had come to
pay her a visit when his horse was shot under him by an Iroquois scout,
and, stunned by the fall, he lay motionless on the ground, when a whole
band of Iroquois, returning from the massacre of Wyoming, poured over
the hilltop directly above them. Elizabeth took one look at the
approaching Indians and then she lifted her Paul on to her own horse and
galloped away to safety with the whole pack whooping at her heels. That
is the tale of Elizabeth Carver, my namesake."

"Oh, Nyoda, how splendid!" cried Sahwah, with sparkling eyes. "Oh, dear,
why can't things like that happen now? Life in America is so tame and
uneventful, compared to what it used to be in the early days." And she
fell to musing discontentedly upon the vast advantage of frontier life
over her own humdrum, modern existence.

Then Veronica began to play on her violin, and Sahwah's discontented
thoughts took wing, and she went floating out on a magic sea of music,
and sat with closed eyes drinking in those wild, seraphic melodies that
flowed from Veronica's enchanted bow until it seemed as if it could be
no mere violin making that music, it was the Angel Israel, playing on
his own heart strings. As Sahwah sat and listened there suddenly came
over her a great feeling of sadness, and unrest, a sense of the vastness
and seriousness of life, and she felt desperately unhappy. She had never