tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth; yet Powhatan did command Uttamatomakkin to seek you and know the truth, because your countrymen will lie much.'

"This savage, one of Powhatan's council, being amongst them held an understanding fellow, the King purposely sent him, as they say, to number the people here, and inform him well what we were and our state. Arriving at Plymouth, according to his directions, he got a long stick, whereon by notches he did think to have kept the number of all the men he could see, but he was quickly weary of that task.* Coming to London, where by chance I met him, having renewed our acquaintance, where many were desirous to hear and see his behavior, he told me Powhatan did bid him to find me out to show him our God, the king, queen, and prince, I so much had told them of. Concerning God, I told him the best I could; the king, I heard he had seen, and the rest he should see when he would. He denied ever to have seen the king, till by circumstances he was satisfied he had. Then he replied very sadly, 'You

* When he returned to Virginia, it is stated, that Powhatan asked him how many people there were in England, and that he replied, "Count the stars in the sky, the leaves on the trees, and the sand upon the sea-shore, such is the number of people in England."- Stith, p. 144.

gave Powhatan a white dog, which Powhatan fed as himself, but your king gave me nothing, and I am better than your white dog.'

"The small time I staid in London divers courtiers and others, my acquaintances, have gone with me to see her, that generally concluded they did think God had a great hand in her conversion, and they have seen many English ladies worse favored, proportioned, and behaviored; and, as since I have heard, it pleased both the king and queen's majesties honorably to esteem her, accompanied with that honorable lady, the Lady Delaware, and that honorable lord, her husband, and divers other persons of good qualities, both publicly at the masks and otherwise, to her great satisfaction and content, which doubtless she would have deserved, had she lived to arrive in Virginia."

Pocahontas, or the Lady Rebecca, as she was now called,* was destined never to leave the country, which had become her own by adoption, nor to gladden again the eyes of her aged father, whose race of life was almost

* Perhaps it is not generally known that her true and original name was Matoax or Matoaka, which the Indians carefully concealed from the English under the assumed one of Pocahontas, having a superstitious notion, that, if they knew her real name, they would be able to do her some mischief. Stith, p. 136.

run. Early in the year 1617, as she was preparing to return to Virginia, she was taken sick at Gravesend and died, being then about twentyold. The firmness and resignation with which she met her death bore testimony to the sincerity of the religious principles, which she had long professed.

two years

It is difficult to speak of the character of Pocahontas, without falling into extravagance. Though our whole knowledge of her is confined to a few brilliant and striking incidents, yet there is in them so complete a consistency, that reason, as well as imagination, permits us to construct the whole character from these occasional manifestations. She seems to have possessed every quality essential to the perfection of the female character; the most graceful modesty, the most winning sensibility, strong affections, tenderness and delicacy of feeling, dovelike gentleness, and most entire disinterestedness. These beautiful qualities were not in her nurtured and trained by the influences of refined life, but were the native and spontaneous growth of her heart and soul.

Her mind had not been formed and fed by books, or the conversation of the gifted and cultivated; the nameless graces of polished life had not surrounded her from her birth and created

He died in the spring of 1618, probably between seventy and eighty years of age.

that tact in manner and deportment, and becoming propriety in carriage and conversation, which all well-bred people, however differing originally in refinement and delicacy of perception, seem to possess in about the same degree; nor had the coarse forms of actual life been, to her eyes, concealed by the elegant drapery which civilization throws over them. From her earliest years she had been familiar with rude ways of living, uncouth habits and lawless passions. Yet she seems to have been, from the first, a being distinct from and unlike her people, though in the midst of them. She reminds one of a delicate wild-flower, growing up in the cleft of a rock, where the eye can discern no soil for its roots to grasp, and sustain its slender stalk. We behold her as she came from the hands of her Maker, who seems to have created her in a spirit of rebuke to the pride of civilization, giving to an Indian girl, reared in the depths of a Virginian forest, that symmetry of feminine loveliness, which we but seldom see, with all our helps and appliances, and all that moral machinery with which we work upon the raw material of character.

But in our admiration of what is lovely and attractive in the character of Pocahontas, we must not overlook the higher moral qualities, which command respect almost to reverence.

Moral courage, dignity, and independence are among her most conspicuous traits. Before we can do justice to them we must take into consideration the circumstances under which they were displayed. At the time when the English first appeared in Virginia, she was a child but twelve or thirteen years old. These formidable strangers immediately awakened in the breasts of her people the strongest passions of hatred and fear, and Captain Smith, in particular, was looked upon as a being whose powers of injuring them were irresistible and superhuman. What could have been more natural than that this young girl should have had all these feelings exaggerated by the creative imagination of childhood, that Captain Smith should have haunted her dreams, and that she should not have had the courage to look upon the man to whom her excited fancy had given an outward appearance corresponding to his frightful attributes?

But the very first act of her life, as known to us, puts her far above the notions and prejudices of her people, and stamps at once a seal of marked superiority upon her character. And from this elevation she never descends. Her motives are peculiar to herself, and take no tinge from the passions and opinions around her. She thinks and acts for herself, and does not hesitate, when thereto constrained, to leave her father, and trust