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Reprint of the original, first published in 1836.

A "big-city melodrama" which tells the story of Ada Wilcox Leicester, an innocent country girl who allows herself to be seduced and corrupted by her aspirations for material wealth. Ada later redeems herself by transforming her grand house into a home for destitute gentlewomen.

Set in the colonial northeastern United States, this is the story of the interracial relationship of a Native American woman and a white hunter.

Our every footstep treads upon a grave! The keel of the snowy-pinioned vessel but turns a fleecy furrow while plowing its way over the abodes of death. Earth is but one vast tomb, where sleep, side by side, commingling their dust, the king and peasant, the master and slave, the beautiful and the repulsive. Beneath the iron-clad feet of our swift steeds—beneath the thunder-rush and lightning speed of engines—beneath the quick, firm tread of business men, and beneath the gentle pressure of the daintily-slippered feet of lovely women, lie the mouldering form—the dust of stalwart men and the more delicate clay that was fashioned by the Master hand into childhood, girlhood, womanhood—beauty. We turn from scenes of busy life, and enter the deep forest, unthinking and careless that beneath our footsteps lie the mouldering bones of the war-painted warrior, beside his broken spear and stringless bow; and, in another place, the dusky forest-maiden, who once wreathed amid the dull blackness of her hair the gorgeously-tinted buds and blossoms of the God-cultured prairie. But so it is. The star that leads civilization westward shines sadly upon the graves of a people almost extinct—a people that have been hunted ruthlessly from their greenwood haunts till every year has seen their graves multiplying thicker and thicker in the wilderness. Then the Anglo-Saxon comes to plow it up and plant corn above the dead warriors, stooping now and then to pick up a stone arrow-head from his furrow, and examine it curiously, as if he did not know what soil his sacrilegious plow was upturning. The Indian sees his council fires flicker out one by one, scarcely rising skyward long enough to gild the ruins of his bark and skin-covered wigwam, or light up the ashes over his deserted altars. Yon star that leads westward has no halting-place for him till it sets on the calm Pacific, writing on its blue waters the history of a people that have perished. It was a lovely morning. The sun rose from its nightly course, radiant with beauty, kissing the dew from the tiny cups of the myriad flowers, tinging with gold the emerald leaves of the forest, and gilding the crests of a thousand little billows that were just waking to life in the shaded pools of the mountain streams. It was a scene of wondrous loveliness—a scene that the eye might willingly rest upon forever, while the soul drank in its freshness till satiated with the very excess of beauty. A scene like that the pen or pencil of man are impatient to portray. The Master Artist—God! upon the canvass of his own created world, has alone written it out. Under one of those picturesque clumps of trees that broke the luxuriant monotony of the rolling grass-land, a corral of covered wagons had been drawn up for the night, and now stood with the canvass swaying in the breeze, circling a snowy little tent which had been pitched against the trunk of a noble tulip-tree, and stood beneath its deep-green branches like a great white bird rested on the grass. The little camp had formed itself late the night before, and the deep breathing of many a stalwart sleeper came from the covered wagons, while the guard kept his post yet, but with a weary fall of the body and a wistful look at the wagons; for he envied the sleepers there with all the earnestness of a tired man.