melancholy sea. Yet the next moment she laughs, with sympathetic glee,
at the sports of her little tribe of children; and soon turns round, with
the homelook in her face, as her husband's foot is heard approaching the
rough-hewn threshold. How sweet must it be for those who have an Eden in
their hearts, like Roger Conant and his wife, to find a new world to
project it into, as they have, instead of dwelling among old haunts of
men, where so many household fires have been kindled and burnt out, that
the very glow of happiness has something dreary in it! Not that this
pair are alone in their wild Eden, for here comes Goodwife Massey, the
young spouse of Jeffrey Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at
her breast. Dame Conant has another of like age; and it shall hereafter
be one of the disputed points of history which of these two babies was
the first town-born child.

But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within view. Peter Palfrey
likewise has built himself a house, and so has Balch, and Norman, and
Woodbury. Their dwellings, indeed,--such is the ingenious contrivance of
this piece of pictorial mechanism,--seem to have arisen, at various
points of the scene, even while we have been looking at it. The forest-
track, trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these sturdy and
ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it never could have
acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many Indian
moccasins. It will be a street, anon! As we observe it now, it goes
onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy strip
of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a decided
line, along which human interests have begun to hold their career. Over
yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid side by side to
make a causeway. In another place, the axe has cleared away a confused
intricacy of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which had been tossed
together by a hurricane. So now the little children, just beginning to