his fathers, and try to use him as a means of influencing his tribe. They
did so, but did not succeed in swaying the tribe by his means, their
success having been limited to winning the half-Indian from the wild ways
of his mother's people, into a certain partial, but decent accommodation
to those of the English. A tendency to civilization was brought out in his
character by their rigid training; at least, his savage wildness was
broken. He built a house among them, with a good deal of the wigwam, no
doubt, in its style of architecture, but still a permanent house, near
which he established a corn-field, a pumpkin-garden, a melon-patch, and
became farmer enough to be entitled to ask the hand of a Puritan maiden.
There he spent his life, with some few instances of temporary relapse into
savage wildness, when he fished in the river Musquehannah, or in Walden,
or strayed in the woods, when he should have been planting or hoeing; but,
on the whole, the race had been redeemed from barbarism in his person, and
in the succeeding generations had been tamed more and more. The second
generation had been distinguished in the Indian wars of the provinces, and
then intermarried with the stock of a distinguished Puritan divine, by
which means Septimius could reckon great and learned men, scholars of old
Cambridge, among his ancestry on one side, while on the other it ran up to
the early emigrants, who seemed to have been remarkable men, and to that
strange wild lineage of Indian chiefs, whose blood was like that of
persons not quite human, intermixed with civilized blood.

"I wonder," said the doctor, musingly, "whether there are really no
documents to ascertain the epoch at which that old first emigrant came
over, and whence he came, and precisely from what English family. Often
the last heir of some respectable name dies in England, and we say that
the family is extinct; whereas, very possibly, it may be abundantly
flourishing in the New World, revived by the rich infusion of new blood in
a new soil, instead of growing feebler, heavier, stupider, each year by