one ready to ask for hospitality, and, peradventure, for Christian and
brotherly communion."

The sight of the aged emigrant had not deceived him. One, who appeared
a wayworn and weary traveller, had indeed ridden out of the forest, at a
point where a path, that was easier to be traced by the blazed trees
that lay along its route, than by any marks on the earth itself, issued
into the cleared land. The progress of the stranger had, at first, been
so wary and slow, as to bear the manner of exceeding and mysterious
caution. The blind road, along which he must have ridden not only far
but hard, or night had certainly overtaken him in the woods, led to one
of the distant settlements that lay near to the fertile banks of the
Connecticut. Few ever followed its windings, but they who had especial
affairs, or extraordinary communion, in the way of religious
friendships, with the proprietors of the Wish-Ton-Wish, as, in
commemoration of the first bird that had been seen by the emigrants, the
valley of the Heathcotes was called.

Once fairly in view, any doubt or apprehension, that the stranger might at
first have entertained, disappeared. He rode boldly and steadily forward,
until he drew a rein that his impoverished and weary beast gladly obeyed,
within a few feet of the proprietor of the valley, whose gaze had never
ceased to watch his movements, from the instant when the other first came
within view. Before speaking, the stranger, a man whose head was getting
gray, apparently as much with hardship as with time, and one whose great
weight would have proved a grievous burthen, in a long ride, to even a
better-conditioned beast than the ill-favored provincial hack he had
ridden, dismounted, and threw the bridle loose upon the drooping neck of
the animal. The latter, without a moment's delay, and with a greediness
that denoted long abstinence, profited by its liberty, to crop the herbage