THE KEY TO THE HEART. 337 dinary, that the inspector called on Barnet's late fellow traveller to see if his account of the journey corresponded with that of the prisoner. It did correspond in every particular, except, as we have said, not a suspicion had ever disturbed his mind of Barnet's baseness of purpose. An interview between the quondam travellers was brought about. The apparently deep penitence of Barnet was met by the hearty forgiveness and unaffected kindness of the merchant, and as he trusts also by the grace of the Redeemer. The few individuals to whom the case was made known, with an enlightened philanthropy which is but too rare in an age that boasts its liberality, generously encouraged his repentings and better purposes, and paved the way for his return to a life of virtue and honest industry, and the confidence and kindness accorded him were not thrown away. He is a redeemed man, a valuable member of society, exemplarily honoring the relations of husband, father, neighbor and friend, all of which he fills; and the mother who in the days of his guilty folly hung her head when her first-born was named, and carried a wound in her bosom no medicine could heal, now gazes in his face again and traces there the radiant lineaments of an honest man and a loving son. We see in this little narrative, that bad as this man was at one period of his life, there nevertheless was a key to his heart; in other words, that he had not sinned away all his sensibilities. Conscience, though slumbering, was not dead. The breathing of the forest breeze awoke it, startled it with the potency of a dying man's moan, from its long dream of guilt! filled his soul with the horrors of remorse, and compelled him to seek shelter from himself and the world in the solitude of a prison. There, in the midst of his unsanctified gloom, a pitying heart found him, and with a wise sympathy sought his recovery to virtue and happiness, taught him the way and encouraged him to attempt it. This saved him, so far as means could avail, and the result is such as to encourage the belief that in all like cases like efforts will be successful. Man is fearfully and wonderfully made, not only in his physical but in his mental and moral constitution. Slight influences disturb the balance. There are moods of the mind in which a word or a look will agitate its profoundest depths, and sway it to and fro like the rocking waves of the troubled ocean. Perhaps in the experience of every transgressor there are moments when the heart will harden or dissolve according as a single tone falling upon it is gentle or hard; as at the moment of congelation the waters freeze if the north breathe upon them, but continue their flow and murmuring music if southern breezes arise. O, if at such moment there was a kindred heart, Christlike, humanized, with a tear and a hope for the vilest of its kind, to say, " Brother, arise, there is bread, and to spare in our Father's house. Return, and sin no more;" was it ever known from the beginning that no glance on the countenance, no moisture in the eye, returned its sign of recognition, if not of almost persuadedness? Alas, alas for us, not falsely, nor without personal experience, sang Scotland's bard— "Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn." We do not pity each other well. We are not mutually merciful. Nay, towards our sinning brother we are not JUST, when we surrender him as a hopeless thing, to be gnawed by horrible remorse, and to be ground to powder in the dungeon of despair. We do a mighty wrong, we act a murderous lie towards our sinning brother, when we refuse to believe him capable of becoming good and happy, and will not hope for him and help him. There is small difference between him who throws his neighbor into the sea and him who refuses to cast him a rope. It is strange that unmercifulness should be a characteristic sin of man. Among devils who received no mercy when they fell, it were less out of place. But man is the child and protegé of mercy. He lives and enjoys his probation amid arrested thunderbolts, and storms of wrath rolled back, and caverns of despair closed, and the hushed curses of the law. The rain, and dew, and sunshine of heaven are descending upon his fields. The birds are piping their sweet notes as they might have done in Eden, and all nature, not veiled in sackloth but clad in multiform glory, waits upon him like a sister. Above all, man lives in the light of glorious and glad revelations, of evangelic and joyful tidings, of living streams of salvation, and of ministering angels, and of voices from the sky, owning him as a younger brother that wandered, but in the far off land of his prodigality found mercy, through the cross and through blood that flowed freely as rain drops from the bosom of Jesus-in the midst of these he stands a monument of mercy, himself unmerciful!! Yes, and too often with one hand on the New Testament and the other on his brother's throat, no argument nor art avails to persuade him that in that brother's bosom may beat a heart of higher aspirations, of better purposes, of purer affinities than his own. Let us learn to have hope for each other; and, as far as possible, faith in each other. When any turns aside let us pity him and believe that all is not lost; and believing there is a key to his heart, let us search for it, not discouraged by outward appearances, nor paralyzed by inward doubts. Having found his heart, let us take him into our bosom and bear him back to the path of virtue and the presence of God, and kneel with him there, and while we weep together over the badness of our way, rejoice together that the lost is found and the dead made alive. THE GRASSHOPPER WAR. THE aboriginal history of this country, now in a great measure lost for ever, would no doubt have formed volumes of great interest, could it have come down to our times like the authentic chronicles of other nations. The men who figured here before the European invasion, were not tame and effeminate imitators, or slumberous day-dreamers. They were men of nerve and enterprise, and free, bold thought, and made their impression upon their own times and contemporaries. We have often thought that by far the richest portion of history has never been written, even in those times and nations that have preserved the amplest records. How little of all the eloquence which at different times and places has moved and agitated the profoundest depths of the soul, has been bound up in language and thus saved from oblivion ! What soul-stirring peals of lofty eloquence bursting from the hearts of those untutored red men who possessed the land before our presence disturbed them, and who in their solemn convictions carried on the debates and con. sultations relative to the means of advancing the common weal! There stood the lofty and wrapt prophet, awaiting or declaring the will of the Great Spirit; and there the wild and bedizened war chief, like a battle-horse champing his bit and pawing the ground, longed for the signal to dash forward in the war path. How many such scenes passed with no historian or bard to make record of them and hand it to the future! Tribe after tribe, and confederacies of tribes, probably thus melted from existence and from memory; no monument, no book, no minstrel, no traditionary legend ever plucked from the flood of time as it rolled on and away, the heroic greatness, the daring enterprise, the burning eloquence, that struggled and perished there. Amid all those rude and savage elements that formed the clans and councils of the primitive country, the same passions and principles ex isted that everywhere sway mankind with varying force as civilization retrogrades or advances. Everywhere and always, man is radically the same; society is the same, except in its circumstances, which summed up, we call it civilization-of which civilization the red man had none. But he had boldness, originality, enterprise, possessed by no other savage race; and the history of him, as we have said, wcck have worn a freshness not common. We were visited some years ago while sojourning in the valley of Wyoming, that field of surpassing natural loveliness and beauty, and of thrilling historical associations, with an almost oppressive rush of reflection upon the red man's history and fate, even in this lovely spot-a spot which the genius of peace might have chosen from among all others as its perpetual dwelling. Yet even here some of the wildest, stormiest scenes in history have occurred, of which tradition still preserves some broken recollections, and which, as recited by the ancient inhabitants, serve to fill out the long winter evenings, and awaken the interest of their fireside audiences. One of the yet extant traditions of Wyoming relates to what is probably known as the Grasshopper War, a story not without its moral, and not undeserving the study of modern and civilized statesmen, who are often willing to "let slip the dogs of war," on grounds as trivial, and with issues almost as disastrous, as those given in this tradition. On each side of the Susquehanna river, which glides gracefully through the valley, directly opposite to each other, dwelt two independent and friendly tribes of Indians. For a long series of years their intercourse was of the most familiar and friendly character. Frequently the females of the one tribe would cross the river and spend the day with those of the other, |