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28 love moves them thus to seek the indissoluble vow. The brother of the king,—her haughty and warlike uncle,—with head towering above all the people,—comes forward at the appointed moment, and gives her hand to her destined husband.

Breathless interest pervades the whole assembly. Powhatan, the proud king of thirty nations, is satisfied. Still his lip trembles, when the darling of his heart transfers her fealty to another. The colonists regard the gentle bride as the hostage of peace, and rejoice in an event which will reprieve them from the perils of savage warfare.

The hallowed rite proceeds. The mystic ring is pressed upon the slender finger of the forest-princess. The Old World weds the New. The benediction is swelled by the tearful ardor of many hearts. For the white strangers could not but remember, that in all their sorrows she had been an unchangeable friend. They could not but remember, that amid her sportive childhood, her firmness had saved their endangered champion from the death-stroke; that when they fainted with famine, she brought them corn with her own hands; that she dared, at the deepest midnight, the trackless wild, to warn them of a conspiracy which must have wrought their extermination. They remembered that she was now their sister in the faith, and that in invoking the smile of heaven upon her, they were blessing the tutelary angel of the colony.

Sir Thomas Dale, in his dispatches to the English