and dense forests of the interior, they are often equally luxuriant on every side of the tree.  The varying shape and robustness of boughs are thought to offer a better means of finding the points of the compass; but none but Indians and hunters grown gray in the woods, can profit by their occult lessons.  The attempts of Roland to draw instruction from them served only to complete his confusion; and, by and by, giving over all hope of succeeding through any exercise of skill or prudence, he left the matter to fortune and his good horse, riding, in the obstinacy of despair, withersoever the weary animal chose to bear him, without knowing whether it might be afar from danger, or backwards into the vicinity of the very enemies whom he had laboured so long to avoid.

As he advanced in this manner, he was once or twice inclined to suspect that he was actually retracing his steps, and approaching the path by which he had entered the depths of the wood; and on one occasion he was almost assured that such was the fact by the peculiar appearance of a brambly thicket, containing many dead trees, which he thought he had noticed while following in confidence after the leading of Telie Doe.  A nearer approach to the place convinced him of his error, but awoke a new hope in his mind, by showing him that he was drawing nigh the haunts of men.  The blazes of the axe were seen on the trees, running away in lines, as if marked by the hands of the surveyor; those trees that were dead, he observed, had been destroyed by girdling; and on the edge of the tangled brake where they were most abundant, he noticed several stalks of maize, the relics of some former harvest, the copse itself having once been, as he supposed, a corn-field,

“It is only a tomahawk-improvement,” said Telie Doe, shaking her head, as he turned towards her a look of joyous inquiry; and she pointed towards what seemed to have been once a cabin of logs of the smallest size—­too small indeed for habitation—­but which, more than half fallen down, was rotting away, half hidden under the weeds and brambles that grew, and seemed to have grown for years, within its little area; “there are many of them in the woods, that were never settled.”

Roland did not require to be informed that a “tomahawk-improvement,” as it was often called in those days, meant nothing more than the box of logs in form of a cabin, which the hunter or land-speculator could build with his hatchet in a few hours, a few girdled trees, a dozen or more grains of corn from his pouch-thrust into the soil, with perhaps a few poles laid along the earth to indicate an enclosed field; and that such improvements, as they gave pre-emption rights to the maker, were often established by adventurers, to secure a claim in the event of their not lighting on lands more to their liking.  Years had evidently passed by since the maker of this neglected improvement had visited his territory, and Roland no longer hoped