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Original copies in printed paper covers are filmed beginning with the front cover and ending on the last page with a printed or illustrated impres- sion, or the back cover when appropriate. All other original copies are filmed beginning on the first page with a printed or illustrated impres- sion, and ending on the last page with a printed or illustrated impression. Les exemplaires originaux dont la couverture en papier est imprim6e sont film6s en commen^ant par le premier p (^ MaMELONS and Ungava ^ Ccgcnb of tl)e Saguenos. BY W. H. H. MURRAY. BOSTON: DE WOLFE, FISKE & CO, 365 Washington Street. 'Z!t^-' ■'-'■.'.'SCA ■■^v ens IS • l^OOglH P(^ Copyright, DK WOLFK, FISKE & CO., 1S90. / y To THAT American who knows and loves the Legendary Lore of his native land, and appreciates what I would fain do for It ,f I were able ; who, distinguished by the bri^rht- ness of his wit, the gentleness of his nature, and his love of pohte letters, is beloved by all who know him ; to ®wr0p ^tetoatt, Jr., Ji.CE., ©. Eftt., J.E.©.^., of Quebec, I inscribe this Tale of Mamelons. Burlington, Vt., ,890. ^^^ AuTHOR. y CONTENTS CHAPTER Argument I. The Trail II. The Fight at Mamelons . III. The Mother's Message IV. Love's Victory . V. At Mamelons PAGE I 7 45 91 124 155 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. T HAVE for some years felt that the con- nection of the old races with the North American Continent, the signs and proofs of whose presence are to be found almost every- where, and nowhere so frequently as on the St. Lawrence, afforded material for entertain- ing authorship. Prompted by this feeling, I have, during these several years past, been working at certain pieces of composition, of which this bit of romance is a fair sample. If it shall so far please the reading public that its publisher shall not lose money by his venture -for letters in our time have no 111 IV PREFACE. \\ \'\ patronage save from the hope of selfish gain — I shall, later on, print others like to it. But if it fail, as it quite likely will, to bring him commercial profit, then they will be forgotten as this one will, until I better them, or they come to a better time. W. H. H. MURRAY. Burlington, Vt., Jan. 7, 1887. U INTRODUCTION. A yjY publishers have reqn<^sted me to pre- pare a brief statement concerning my literary work, especially that portion of it relatirig to the character known as John Nor- ton the Trapper — and the stories cnHed the ** Adirondack Tales." They represent that there is an unusual curiosity and interest on the part of many touching this matter, and that a brief statement from me, as the author of them, will please many and interest all who read my works. I know that many thousands of people do feel in this way, for my mails for several t^n'.IMI«(>f>"U-f-'*.^ VI INTRO D UCriON. i \ years have brought me ahiiost daily a most agreeable correspondence concerning not only the character of John Norton the Trapper, but the general scope and characteristics of my literary work; and because of this personal knowledge I do the more cheer- fully comply with my publishers' request, and will, now and here, set down as briefly as I may what seems likely to be of interest to those who read this volume. The first volume ever published, of my writing, was by the house of Ticknor & Fields, in 1868, I think, and had for its title ** Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness." This was the book which first brought the Adirondacks to popular notice, and did so much to advertise that now famous region to the sporting and touring classes of the country. The notice- INTRODUCrrOIV. vu able thing as to this vokime is that it was not prepared by me for pubHcation, and while writing the several chapters I had no idea that they, or anything I should ever write, would be published. I was then in the cleri- cal profession, and was stationed at Meriden, Conn. I had at this time a habit of compos- ing each day, when my duties permitted me the leisure, some bits of writing wholly apart from my profession and work. They were of the nature of exercises in English composi- tion, and had no other interest to me than the mental refreshment it gave me to write them, and the hope that the doing of them would assist me to improve my style in ex- pression. They were constructed slowly and rewritten many times, until they were as sim- ple and accurate as to the use of words as I VUl INTRODUCTION. \ \ could make them. I enjoyed the work very much, and the composition of those little bits of description and humor delighted me prob- ably more than they ever have the readers of them. By an accident of circumstances they were printed in the Meriden Recorder, and, beyond pleasing a few hundreds of local readers, made no reputation for themselves whatever. At least, I never heard of them or gave them any thought. It was owing to James T. Fields that their merit, such as they had, was discovered, and that they were given in volume form to the world. Of the recep- tion the little book met with at the hands of the public, I need not speak. As to it I know no one was more surprised than I was. It made the Adirondacks famous, and gave me a nom de plume which has almost over- go INTRODUCTION. IX shadowed the name I was christened with. What pleases me most as to it is the thought that it helped to introduce healthier fashions of recreation, and brought thousands into close and happy connection with Nature. Of several volumes of sermons that were published while I was in the clerical profes- sion I make no mention, for I do not regard them as literary productions. They represent only a temporary popular demand, and as compositions only the low average possible to an overworked man, compelled by hlo duties to do too much to do anything well. The volume known as the " Perfect Horse" was, I believe, with the exception of Hiram Woodruff's litde volume, the first attempt made by an American author to teach the breeders of the trotting horse in this country the true X INTRODUCTION. principles and correct methods of equine prop- agation. It had a large sale, and, I have rea- son to think, helped the country to needed knowledge. To me it only stood for years of wide and close studentship of the ques- tion, and a benevolent endeavor. The prompting motive in the preparation of " Daylight Land" was this : The little book "Adventures in the Wilderness" was published in 1868, I think, and under circumstances such- as I have explained. I had no thought at that time of becoming an author. The several chapters of that little volume were written as exercises in composition. I was, at the writ- * ing of them, only some twenty-six years old. I knew little of life or nature, and absolutely nothing of what literary balance and fitness mean. My knowledge of woodcraft was then INTRODUCTION. XI slight, of the American Continent slighter yet. Naturally the book, because of the fame it won, became, as years passed, my knowledge grew apace, and my power of expression ripened, a regret to me. It did not in any sense represent me as an author. This feel- ing was shared by others who have regard for my writings, especially along the lines of de- scription and entertainment ; and I was urged to compose a volume of the same general character as my first little book, that should be a fairer and happier expression of myself as an author, in the lighter moods of com- position. It may interest some to learn - especially young authors and literary folk — that " Daylight Land " had for its prompting cause the feeling that it was not fit for me to be permanently represented in descriptive II p \ ; ! xu INTEODUCTION. writing and in composition of the lighter sort, by that little book that has gone so far and done so much of good in many ways, but which, because of the reasons stated, has al- ways been extremely unsatisfactory to me. I will now come directly to the character of John Norton the Trapper and the -Adiron- dack Tales." I was once at a luncheon at which Mr. James T. Fields presided. Several clever literary men of more or less prominence were present. Mr. Emerson was there, and in answer to the query, - What makes a story a great story," said : "A story which will make the average reader laugh and cry both is a great story, and he who writes it is a true author." The definition struck me, when I heard it, as a very proper one ; and it has •1 : INTRO D UCTFON. Xlll influenced me in my choice of subjects and methods of treatment ever since. Another question discussed at that table was this : - Why must the feminine element be introduced so constantly?" or, as one of the witty lunchers phrased it, ''Why must every author forever introduce a woman into his story?" This was discussed at length, all assuming that such necessity did exist. I had not engaged in the spirited talk, being well content to listen. This Mr. Fields noted, and insisted on "Parson Murray"— as he facetiously called me — giving his views. I replied that I would sooner keep quiet, espe- cially as I did not agree with the verdict of the table. This attracted a 3urprised atten- tion, and I was compelled to say "that I did XIV INTRODUCTION. not see the need of introducing a woman into every story, and that I believed a story meet- ing Mr. Emerson's definition of a great story, viz., one which would make the readers of it laugh and cry both, could be written without a woman appearing in it, and that in some masculine natures was a tenderness as deep, a sympathy as sweet, and a love as strong as existed in woman." And I added, •* Mr. Emerson has forgotten that in a book with which, as he was a clergyman for years, he is perfectly familiar, there is a picture given of two men who * loved each other beyond the love of women.' " Not to dilate further, from that day Mr. Fields never ceased to urge me to ** attempt that story," and, being most friendly to me, — and to what young person with any talent ■3/.; INTRODUCTION. XV was he not ever a friend? — he would say, •• I tell you, Murray, try and see if you can write that story, not a woman or the hint of one, good or bad, in it ; for it may be you might succeed, and if you should, you know what Emerson said; and I would like to be the publisher." Prompted by this kindly thought for me, and moved by assisting cir- cumstances, I wrote the " Story of the Man Who Didn't Know Much." It was composed amid the pressure of journalistic as well as clerical labors, by being dictated to a type- writer, and appeared in the weekly issues of the Golden Rule, a journal of which I was editor and owner. It gave grfeat satisfaction to the readers of the paper, and increased its circulation appreciably. Of its literary merit, if it had any, the readers of the vol- -.-^,.X ,._:.. * . ■ r ! XVI INTRODUCTION. ume can judge. The pleasantest thought to me, perhaps, concerning it, was the fact that Mr. Fields came one day to my study, and in his genial, earnest way exclaimed, " Murray, you have done what you said could be done ; you have written a story up to the level of Emerson's definition, for I have read it from beginning to end, and laughed and cried over it both." It is doubtless owing to this story and the success of it, more than to any other cause, that my mind was turned toward liter- ature as the field in which I could work with the greatest pleasure to myself, and perhaps with the largest resultant benefit to mankind. The character of the Lad was sketched with the desire to illustrate the beauty and moral force of innocence and simplicity, as con- trasted with great mental endowments. It INTRODUCIION. XVll ■was from listening to the playing of the great- est master of the violin in modern times, Ole Bull, that I conceived the description of the Lad's violin and his manner of playing it at the ball. The great violinist expressed to me the delight the reading of the passage gave him, and jokingly declared that he en- joyed it all the more because it was composed by a man who couldn't play a note himself! Of John Norton — and this must stand as answer to all the interrogations that have been put to me concerning him — I have this to say. I never saw any such man as John Norton ; never saw one so good as he is, in ' ly vision of him ; never saw one who even suggested him. He is a creation, pure and simple, of my imagination. But, though I never saw such a man, he nevertheless r XVUl INTRODUCTION. Stands for an actual type. Big-bodied, big- headed, big-hearted, wise, humorous, humane, brave, he types to me the old-fashioned New England man, who, having lived his life in the woods, has had developed in him those virtues and qualities of head and heart, of mind and soul, in harmony with his life-long surroundings. Through him, as my mouth- piece, I tell whatever of knowledge I have of woodcraft, whatever appreciation I have of Nature, and whatever wisdom I may have been taught by my communings with her si- lence. This is all I know of John Norton the Trapper. The " Story that the Keg told me " was composed simply to introduce the character of John Norton to the reader, to present him, as it were, to the reader's eye, and pare him to appreciate his characteristics. ....^ -A INTRODUCTION. XIX The " Adirondack Talcs," as outlined in my mind, consist of six volumes, three of which are already written and await publication, the other three I hope to complete within the next five or six years. The Canadian Idyls will consist also of six volumes, the " Doom of Mamelons," " Ungava," and '• Mistassinni " being the first three. In them I treat of the myths and traditions of the aboriginal races of America as located especially in the north- ern section of the continent, and they repre- sent my best effort. It is not likely that much, if indeed any part, of what I may write will be granted a permanent place in the literature of my country, nor am I stirred to effort by any ambition or dream that it may. I shall be well satisfied if, by what I write, some present entertainment be afforded XX INTRODUCTION. the reader: a love of nature inculcated; and encouragement given to a more manly or womanly life. As my expectation is modest, I am the more likely, perhaps, to live long enough to see some small part of it, at least, realized. W. H. H. MURRAY. Burlington, Vt. I r, ARGUMENT. T^HE development of the story turns upon the working of an old Indian prophecy or tradition, which had been in the Lenni- Lenape tribe, to the effect, that when an intermarriage between a princess of their tribe and a white man should occur, it would bring ruin to the tribe, and cause it to be- come extinct at Mamelons. For it was at the mouth of the Saguenay, as they held, that the whites first landed on this western conti- nent. This intermarriage, or " cross of red with white," had occurred, and the time had nearly come when the last of the race ARGUMENT. - \ should, in accordance with the old prophecy, die at Mamelons. The persons introduced into this tale are John Norton, the Trapper, who is comrade and bosom friend of the chief of the Lenni- Lenape ; the chief himself, who is dying from an old wound received in a fight at Mame- lons, and has sent a runner to summon the Trapper to his bedside, to receive his dying message ; a very beautiful woman of that most peculiar and ancient of all known peo- ples, the Basques of Southern Spain, the last of their queenly line, who has been mar- ried in France by the chiefs brother, and to whom a daughter has been born, Atla, the beautiful heroine of the story. And, in addi- tion to these, is an old chief of the famous Mistassinni tribe, who had had his tongue cut ARGUMENT. 3 out at the torture stake by the Esquimaux, from whose fury he had been rescued by a party of warriors, headed by the Trapper. At Mamelons in a great fight, fought in the darkness and terror of an earthquake commotion, the chief of the Lenni-Lenape had, unknowingly, slain his brother, who, returning from France with his young Basque wife, had been wrecked on the coast of Labrador, and, out of gratitude to the Esqui- maux, who had treated him kindly, he joined their ranks as they marched up to Mamelons to the great battle. Thus, fighting as foes, unknown to each other, in the darkness that enveloped the field, he was killed by his brother, having seriously wounded him in return. The Basque princess, thus widowed by the 4 ARGUMENT, untimely death of her young husband, gave birth to Atla, who was thus born an orphan, and under doom herself. Her mother, soon after the birth of Atla, was rescued from death by the Trapper, and loved him with all the ardor of her fervent nature. His affections she strove and hoped to win, and would, perhaps, have succeeded, had not death claimed her. Dying, she left her love and hopes as an heritage to her daughter, and charged her, with solemn tenderness, to win the Trapper's affection, and, married to him, become the mother of a mighty race, in whose blood the beauty and strength of the two oldest and handsomest races of the earth should be happily mingled. The chief, knowing of her wish, and the instructions left to Ada by her departed upm ARGUMENT. 5 mother, summons the Trapper to his death- bed, to tell him the origin of the doom, and the possibility or surety of its being" avoided by his loving and marrying Atla. For, by the conditions of the old curse it was pro- claimed when spoken, that the ** doom shall not hold in f^-se of son born in the female line from sire without a cross," viz.: — from a pure-blooded white man. The Trapper in his humility feels himself to be unworthy of so splendid an alliance, and resists the natural promptings of his heart. But at last the beautiful Atla wins him to a full confession ; and at her urgent request, against the Trapper's wish, they start for Mamelons to be married, where, before the rite is concluded, she dies, so fulfilling the old prediction of her father's tribe. 6 .iRGUMENT. In the Basque princess, the mother of Atla, the author has striven to portray an utterly unconventional woman, natural, bar- baric, original; splendid in her beauty, and glorious in her passions, such as actually lived in the world in the far past, when women were — it must be confessed — totally unlike the prevalent type of to-day. In her child, Atla, the same type of natural woman- hood is preserved, but slightly sobered in tone and shade of expression. But as studies of the beautiful and the unconventional in womanhood, both are unique and delightful. Note. — The notes which have been connected in explanation of certain passages of the story, are so peculiarly interesting and suggestive that they make the reader wish that the author had extended them in fuller exposition of that " lore of woods and waters «in<'! of antique days " with which he is so familiar. Publishers. MAMELONS.^ A LEGEND OF THE SAGUENAY. CHAPTER I. THE TRAIL. IT was a long and lonely trail, the southern end of which John Norton struck in answer to the summons which a tired runner brought him from the north. The man had made brave running, for whe.. he reached the Trapper's cabin and had placed the birch-bark packet in his hands, he staggered to a pile of skins * Mamelons. The Indians' name for the mouth of the Saguenay, and signifies the Place of the Great Mounds. See note 12. 7 I 8 MA MELONS. and dropped heavily on them, Hke a hound which, from a three-days' chase, trails weakly « to the hunter's door, spent nig-h to death. So came the runner, running from the north, and so, spent with his mighty race, dropped as one dead upon the pile of skins. He bore the death-call of a friend, whose friendship had been tested on many an am- bushed trail and the sharp edge of dubious batde. The call was writ on bark of birch, thin as the thinnest silk the ancients wove from gossamer in the old days when weaving was an art and mystery, and not a sordid trade to earn a pittance with, traced in deli- cate letters by a hand the Trapper would have died for. A good five hundred miles that trail ran northward before it ended at the couch of skins, in the great room of the hound weakly h. So th, and )ed as whose n am- ubious birch, wove saving sordid i deli- have > that .t the f the MAAfELONS. g great house, in which the chief lay dying. And when the Trapper struck it he struck It as an eagle strikes homeward toward the cradle crag of his younglings, when talon., are heavy and daylight scant. lie drew his line by the star that never sets, and litde turning did he make for rivers, rapids, or tangled swamp ; for mountain slope or briery windfall. He drew a trail no man had ever trod — a blazeless' trail, unmarked by stroke ^ In order to mark the direction of his course in trailing through the woods the trailer slashes with his axe or knife the bark of the trees he passes, by which signs he is able to retrace his course safely, or follow the same trail easily some future time. A blazed trail is one thu= plainly marked. A blazeless trail is one on which the trailer has no marks or "blazes" to run by, but draws his line by other and occult signs, which tell him in what direction he is going and which are known only by those initiated in the mysteries of woodcraft. lO A f.l MELONS. of axe or cut of knife, by broken twig or sharpened rod, struck into mold or moss, and by its anorle ' telling whence came the trailer, whither went he, and how fast. From earli- est dawn till night thickened the woods and massed the trees into a solid blackness, he hurried on, straight as a pigeon flies when homing, studying no sign for guidance, leav- ing none to tell that he had come and gone. He was at middle prime of life, tough and pliant as an ashen bougii grown on hill, sea- soned in hall, sweated and strung by constant exercise for highest action, and now each mus- ^ Certain tribes of Indians north of the St. Lawrence left accurate record of their rate of progress, and how far they had come, by the length and angle of the slanted sticks they drove here and there into the ground as they sped on. The Nasquapees were best known as practicing this habit. MAMELONS. I r cle and sinew of his superb and superbly con- ditioned frame was taut with tension of a strone desire — to reach the bedside of the dying chief before he died. For the message read : " Come to me quick, for I am alone with the terror of death. The chief is dying. At the pillar of white rock, on the lake, a canoe, with oars and paddle, will be waiting." The Trapper was clad in buckskin from cap to moccasins. His tunic, belted tight and fringeless, was opened widely at the throat for freest breathing. A pack, small, but rounded with strained fullness, was at his back. His horn and pouch were knotted to his side. In tightened belt was knife, and, trailing muzzle down and held reversed, a double rifle. Stripped was the man for speed, as when balanced on the issue of the race hang r w^ 12 MAMELQNS. life and death. As some ^reat ship, caught by somc! sudden gale off Anticosti or Dead Man's Reef, and bare of sail, stripped to her spars, past battures hollow and hoarse-voiced as death and ghastly white, and through the damned eddies that would suck her down and crush her with stones which grind forever and never see the light, sharpening their cuttincfs with their horrid Lyrists, runs scud- ding ; so ran the strong mr.n northward, urged by a fear stronger than that of wreck on the ghost-peopled shore of deadly St. Lawrence. A hound, huge of size, bred to a hair, ambled steadily on at heel. And though he crossed many a h(;t scent, and more than once his hurrying master started a buck warm from his nest, and nose was .busy with knowledge of game afoot, he gave J I 'x MAMELONS. n no whimper nor swerved aside, but, silent, followed on in the swift way his master was so hurriedly makiuLf, as if he, too, felt the solemn need which lu-ged the trail north- ward. Never before had runner faced a lonorer or a harder trail, or under high com- mand or deadly peril pushed it so fiercely forward. Siivktw days the trail ran thus, and still the man, tireless of foot, hurried on, and the hound followed silently at heel. What a body was his ! How its powers responded to the soul's summons ! For on this seventh day of hio-h- est effort, taxing with heavy strain each muscle, bone, and joint to the utmost, days lengthened from earliest dawn to deepest gloaming, the strong man's face was fresh, his eye was bright, and he swung steadily onward, with p i ; H MAMELONS. long, swinging, casy-motioncd gait, as if the prolonged and terrible effort he was making was but a morning's burst of speed for healthy exercise. The climate favored him. October, with all its glorious colors, was on the woods, and the warm body of the air was charged through and through with cool atmospheric movements from the north. It was an air to race for one's life in. Soft to the lungs, but 'fdled to its blue edge with oxygen and that mystic element men call ozone ; the overflow of God's vitality spilleci over the azure brim of heaven, whose volatile flavor fills the nose of him who breathes the air of mountains. Favored thus by rare conditions, the best that nature gives the trailer, the strong man raced onward through the ripe woods like an old-time run- I. MAMELOA'S. 15 ner running ior the laurel crown and the applause of Greece. It Wc,s nigh sunset of the seventh day, and the Trapper halted beside a spring, which bubbled coldly up from a cleft rock at the base of a cliff. He cast aside his hunting shirt, baring his body to the waist, and bathed himself in the cool water. He knelt to its mossy rim and sank his head slowly down into the refreshing depths, and held it there, that he might feel the delicious coolness run thrilling through his heated body. He cast his moccasins aside and bathed his feet, sore and hot from monstrous effort, sinkino- them knee deep in the cold flowage of the blessed spring. Then, refreshed, he stood upon the velvet bank, his mighty chest and back pink as a lady's palm, his strong feet glowing, his i6 MA MELONS. face afliish through its deep tan, while the wind dried him, and the ofolden leaves of the overhanging maples fell round him in showers. Refreshed and strengthened, he reclothed himself, relaced his moccasins and tightened belt, but before he broke away he drew the sheet of birch-bark from his breast and read again the lines traced delicately thereon. " Yes, I read aright," he muttered to him- self; ''the writing on the birch is plain as ivy on the oak, and it says : ' Come to me quick, for I am alone with the terror of death. The chief lies dying. At the pillar of white rock, on the lake, a canoe, with oars and pad- dle, will be waiting.' " And the Trapper thrust the writing back to its place above his heart and burst away down the decline that led to the lake at a run. MA MELONS. 17 '' IVe bent the trail like a fool," he mut- tered, as he reached the bottom of the dip, " or the lake lies hereaway," and even as he spoke the waters of a lake, red with the red flame of the setting sun, gleamed like a field of fire through the maple-trees. The Trapper dashed a hand into the air with a gesture of delight, and burst away again at a lope through the russet bushes and golden leaves that lay like plucked plumage, ankle, deep, upon the ground toward the lake, burning redly through the trees not fifty rods beyond. A moment brought him to the shore, bordered thick with cedar orfowths, and, breaking through the fragrant branches with a leap, he landed on a beach of silver sand, and lo ! to the left, not a dozen rods away, washed by the red waves, stood the ■*;: : ; i8 MAMELOAS. signal rock, fifty feet in height, and from water hne to summit white as drifted snow. " God be praised ! " exclaimed the Trapper, and he lifted his cap reverently. " God be praised that I reckoned the coiu'sc; aright and ran the trail straight from end to end. For the woods be wide and lon<^, and to have missed this lake would have been a sorry hap when one like her is alone with the dying. But where is the canoe that she said should be here, for sixty miles of water cannot be jumped like a brook or forded like a rapid, and the island lies nigh the western shore, and who may reach it afoot ? " And he ran his eyes along the sand for signs to tell if boat or human foot had pressed it. He searched the beach a mile around the bay, but not a sign of human presence could MAMELONS. 19 be found. Then nigh the signal rock he sat upon the sand, unloosed his pack, and from it took crust and meat, of which he ate, then fed the hound, sharing the scant supper with him equally. " It is the last morsel. Rover," said the Trapper to the' dog as he fed him. " It is the last morsel in the pack, and you and I will breakfast lighdy unless luck comes." The dog surely understood the mas- ter's saying, for he rolled his hungry eyes toward the pack as if he bitterly sensed the bitter prophecy ; then — canine philosopher as he was — he curled himself amid some dried leaves contentedly, as if by extra sleep he would make good the lack of food. " Thou art wiser than men ! " exclaimed the Trapper, looking reflectively at his canine companion, now snoring in his warm russet T 20 MAMELONS, bed. " Thou art wiser, my dog, dian men, for they waste breath and time in bewaihng their hard fortunes, but you make good the loss that pinches thee by holding fast and quickly to the nearest gain." And he gazed upon the sleeping hound with reflecting and admiring cyr Then slowly beliind the western hills sank the red sun. rh(^ fer/or faded from the water and the lake darkened. The winds died with the day. Gradually the farther shore retired from sight, and the distinguish- ing hills became blankly black. The upper air held on to the retreating light awhile, but finally surrendered the last trace, and night held all the world. Amid the gathering gloom upon the beach the Trapper sat in counsel with his thoughts. MA MELONS. 21 At length he rose, and with dry driftage within reach kindled a fire. By the light of it he cut some branches of nigh cedars, and with them made a bed upon the sand, then cast himself upon his fragrant couch. Twice he rose and listened. Twice renewed the fire with larger sticks. At last, tired nature failed the will. The toil of the lone trail fell heavily on him. Slumber captured his senses and he slept the sleep of sheer ex- haustion. But before he slept he muttered to himself: ''She said a canoe, with oars and paddle, should be here, and the canoe will come." The hours passed on. The Dipper turned its circle in the northern sky, and stars rose and set. The warm shores felt the coolness of the night, and from the water's echje a soft 22 MA MELONS. mist flowed and floated in thin layers along the cooling sands. Tlie logs of seasoned wood glowed with a steady warmth in the calm air. The fog turned yellow as it drifted above the burning brands, so that a halo crowned the ruddy heat. The night was at its middle watch, when the hound rose to his feet and questioned the lake with lifted nose, but his mouth gave no signal. If one was coming, it was the coming of a friend. Ten minutes passed, then he whined softly, and, walking to the water's edge, waited ex- pectant ; not long, for in a moment a canoe, moving silently, as if wind-blown, came float- ing toward the beach, and lodged upon it noiselessly, as bird on bough. And a girl, paddle in hand, stepped to his side, and, stooping, caressed his head, then moved to- '•» MA MELONS. 23 ward the fire and stood above the sleeping man. She gendy stirred the brands until they flamed, and in the light thus made studied the strong face, bronzed with the tan of the woods, the face of one who never failed friend nor fought foe in vain, and who had come so far and swiftly in answer to her call. She was of that old race who lived in the morning of the world, when giants walked the earth' and the sons of God married the dauehters of men.^ And the old blood's love of strength was in her. She noted the power and sym- metry of his mighty frame, which lay relaxed ^ " There were giants in the earth in those days." — Gen. vi. 4. " " The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair , and they took them wives of all which they chose." — Gen. vi. 2. 24 MA MELONS. from tension in the graceful attitude of sleep ; the massive chest, broad as two common men's, which rose and fell to his deep breath- ing ; the great, strongly corded neck, rooted to the vast trunk as some huge oak grown on a rounded hill. She noted, too, the large and shapely head, the thick, black hair, closely cropped, and the sleeper's face — where might woman find another like it ? — lean of flesh, large featured, plain, but stamped with the seal of honesty, chiseled clean of surplus by noble abstinence, and bearing on its front the look of pride, of power and courage to face foe or fate. Thus the ^\x\ sat and watched him as he slept, stirring the brands softly that she micrht not lose sicrht of a face which was to her the face of a god — such god as the l)r()udest woman of her race, in the old time MA MELONS. 25 might, W'th art or goodness, have won and wedded. Dawn came at last. The bhie above turned gray. The stars .'shortened their pointed fires and faded. The east kindled and llamed. Heat flowed westward like an essential oil hidden in the pores and channels of the air ; while light, brightly clean and clear, ran round the horizons, revealing its own and the love- liness of the world. Then woke the birds. Morning found a voice sweet as her face. A hermit thrush sent her soft, pure call from the damp depths of the dripping woods. A woodpecker sig- nalled breakfast with his hammer so sturdily that all the elfin echoes of the \^^^9 merrily mimicked him. An eagle, huntino- throuo-h the sky, at the height of a mile, dropped like a ■^ 26 MAAf/':i.OAS. plummet into the lake, and, struggling up- ward from his perilous plunge, heavily weighted, lined his slow flight straight toward his distant crag. The girl rose to her feet, and, leaning on her paddle, for a moment gazed long and tenderly at the sleeper's face, then softly breathed, "John Norton!" The call, low as it was, broke through the leaden ofates of sluniber with the suddenness and effect of a great surprise. Quick as a flash he came to his feet, and, for a moment, stood dazed, bewildered, his bodily powers breaking out of sleep quicker than his senses, and he saw the [nv\ as visitant in vision. He stepped to the water's edge and bathed his face, and turning, freshened and fully awake, saw with glad and apprehensive eyes, who stood before him, and tenderly said: ^u^^gj»^2jcjjj^ MAMEI.ONS. 2^ ' Is the daughter of the old race well ? " •' Well, well, 1 am, John Norton," answered the girl, and h(!r voice was low and sofdy musical, as water falling into water. " I am well, friend of " my mother and my friend. And the chief still lives and will live till you come, for so he bade me tell you." And she reached her small hand out to him. He took It in his own, and held it as one holds the hand of child, and answered : *' I am glad. Thou comest like a bird in the night, silently. Why did you not awake me when you came ? " *' Why should I wake thee, John Norton?" returned the girl. "I am a day ahead of that the chief set for your coming. For our run- ner — the swiftest in the woods from Mistas- sinni to Labrador — said: 'Twelve suns must "■P ! I I 28 MA MELONS. rise and set before my words could reach thee,' and the chief declared : ' No living man, not even you, could fetch the trail short of ten days.' He timed me to this rock him- self, and told me when I would come nor wait another hour, that I would wait by the white rock two dnys before I saw your face. But I would come, for a voice within me said — a voice which runs vocal in our blood, and has so run through all my race since the beginning of the world — this voice with- in kept saying : * Go, for thou shalt find hiui there V And so I, hurrying, came. But tell me how many days were you upon the trail ? " ** I fetched the trail in seven days from sun to sun," answered the Trapper, modestly. " Seven days ! " exclaimed the girl, while MAMELOAS. 29 the light of a great surprise and admiration shone in her eyes. " Seven days ! Thou hast the deer's foot and the cougar's strength, John Norton. No wonder that the war chiefs love you." And then after a moment's pause : *' But why didst thou push the trail so fiercely?" '' I read your summons and I came," replied the Trapper, sententiously. The girl started at the hearing of the words, which told her so simply of her power over the man in front of her. Her nostrils dilated, and through the glorious swarth of her cheek there came a flush of deeper red. The gloom of her eyes moistened like glass to the breath. Her ripe lips parted as to the passing of a gasp, and the full form lifted II ..^. 30 MA MELONS. as if the spirit of passion within would fling the beautiful frame it filled upon the strong man's bosom. Thus a moment the sweet whirlwind seized and shook her, then passed. Her eyes drooped modestly, and with a sweet humbleness, as one who has received from heaven beyond her hope or merit, she simply said : " I have brought you food, John Norton. Come and eat." The food was of the woods. Bread coarse and brown, but sweet with the full cereal sweetness ; corn, parched in the fire, which eaten, lingered long as a rich flavor in the mouth ; venison, roasted for a hunter's hun- ger, within whose crisp surface the life of the deer still showed redly ; water from the lake, drunk from a cup shaped from the inner MAMELONS. 31 bark of the golden birch, whose hollow cur- vature still burned with warm chrome colors. So, on the cool lake shore, in the red light of early morn, they broke their fast. The Trapper ate as a strong man eats after long toil and scant feeding, not grossly, but with a heartiness good to see. The girl ate litde, and that absendy, as if the atoms in her mouth were foreign to her senses and no taste followed eating. "You do not eat," said the Trapper. "The sun will darken on the lower hills before we come to food again. Are you not hungry ? " " Last night I was ahungered," answered the girl, musingly. *' But now I hunger no more," and her face was as the face of a Madonna holding her child, full of a plenti- ful and sweet content. 32 MA MELONS. i 1 I ; *' I do not understand you," returned the Trapper, after a moment's silence. " Your words be plain, but their sense is hidden. Why are you not hungry?" " You read me once out of your sacred books, John Norton, that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro- ceedeth out of the mouth," responded the girl. *' I knew not then the meaning of the words, for I was a girl, and had no under- standing, and the words were old, older than your books, and therefore deeply wise, and I, being yjung, did not know. But I know now." And here the girl paused a moment, hesitated as a young bird to leave the sure bough for the first time, then, rallying cour- age for the deed, gazed with her large eyes lovingly into his, and timidly explained : — MAMELONS. Z2> •' I am not hungry John Norton, for God has fed me ! " To the tanned cheek of the Trapper there rushed a glow Hke the flush to a face of a girl. The light of a happy astonishment leaped from his eyes, and his breath came strongly. Then light and color faded, and as one vexed and heartily ashamed of his vanity, while the lines of his face tightened, he made harsh answer : " Talk no more in riddles, lest I be a fool and read the riddle awry. Nor jest again on matters grave as life, lest I, who am but mortal man and slow withal, forget wisdom and take thy girlish playfulness for earnest talk. Nay, nay," he added earnestly, as she rose to her feet with an exclamation of pas- sionate pain, '* Say not another word, you W- Si- ^ •% i 34 ArAMELONS. hi ! M have done no ill. You be young and fanci- ful, and I — I be a fool ! Come, let us go. The pull is long, and we shall need the full day's light to reach the island ere night falls." And, placing his rifle in the canoe, he signaled to the hound and seated him- self at the oars. The girl obeyed his word, stepped to her place and pushed the light boat from the sands on which so much had been received and so much missed. Per- haps her v/oman's heart foretold that love like hers would get, even as it gave, all at last. • • • • • The house was large and lofty, builded of logs squared smoothly and mortared neatly between the edges. In the thick walls were deep embrasures, that light through the great ■««.>t\«.*M MAMELONS. 35 windows might l^e more al)unclant. The builders loved die sun and made wide path- ways for its entrance everywhere. The case- ments, fashioned to receive storm shutters, were proof against winter's wind and lead alike. In the steep roof were dormer win- dows, glassed with panes, tightly soldered to the sash. At either end of the great house a huge chimney rose, whose solid masonry of stone stood boldly out from the hewn logs, framed closely against its mortared sides. A wide veranda ran the entire length of the southern side. A balustrade of cedar logs, each hewn until it showed its red and fra- grant heart, ran completely round it. Above posts of the same sweetly odored wood — whose fragrance, with its substance, lasts for- ever — was lattice-work of poles stripped of ii 36 MAMELOAS. I ; I i, their birchen bark, and snowy white, on which a huge vine ran its brown tracery, enriched with bunches, heavily pendent, of bhie-black grapes — that pungent growth of northern woods, whose odors make the wind- ing rivers sweet as heaven. In front, a nat- ural lawn sloped to the yellow sands, on which the waves fell with soft sound. Eastward, a widely acred field showed care- ful husbandry. Garnet and yellow colored pods hung gracefully from the brown poles. The ripened corn showed golden through the parted husks, and beds of red and yel- low beets patched the dark soil with their high colors. The solar flower turned its broad disk toward the wheeling sun, while dahlias, marigold, and hardy annuals, with their briglit colors, warmed like a floral camp- f II. fc«,fc,^^i»,.,»,rt^.*«,,i^4t'\. ^fi . ^ ^m* ■ -■^^.11 *. <^ A?. :a "^ ^ :/. 1.0 I.I 11.25 UilZS |2.5 U 11,6 Hiotographic Sciences Corporation 23 WIST MAIN STRUT WIISTU.N.Y. USM (716)172-4903 '^ ^ ^°^ ^ 4^ £ 6^ ^ ^ y ;i 68 MAMELONS. Hi . 'I , 'i I I III " She listened to the end. Then rose and took my hand and kissed it, saying : ' Brother, I kiss thy hand as head of our house. What's done is done. The dead cannot come back.' Then, covering up her face with her rich laces, she went v/ithin the hanging skins, and for seven days was hidden with her woe. •* But when the seven days were passed she came, and we held council. Next morn, with ten canoes deep laden with gold and precious stuffs, that portion of her dower saved from the wreck, we started hitherward. This island, after many days of voyaging, we reached, and landed here, by chance or fate I know not, for she spake the word that stopped us on this shore, not I. For on this island did my fathers live, and here the fate- ful cross came to our blood, that cross with MA MELONS. gg France which was not fit; for the traditions of our tribe — a mystery for a thousand years — had said that any cross of red with white should ripen doom at Mamelons ; for there it was the white first landed on the shore of this western world.' * The antiquity of European visitation to the St. Lawrence is unascertained, and, perhaps, unascertain- able. But there is good reason to think that lonjr be- fore Jacques Cartier, Cabot, or even the Norsemen, ever saw the American continent, the old Basque people carried on a regular commerce in fish and fur with the St. Lawrence. It is not impossible but that Columbus obtained sure knowledge of a western hemisphere from the old race, who dwelt, and had dwelt, immemorially among the mountains of Spain, as well as from the Norse charts. Their language, legends, traditions, and many signs compel one to the conclusion that the old Iberian race, who once held all modern Europe and the British isle in subjection, was of ocean origin, and pusiied on the van of an old-time and world-wide navi- '1-1 70 MAMELONS. " She needed refuge, for within her life- another Hfe was growing. Brooding, she prayed that the new soul within her might not be a boy. * A boy,' she said, * must meet the doom foretold. A girl, perchance, might not be held.' Her faith and mine were one, save hers was older, she being of the old trunk stock, of which the world-supporting Tortoise were a branch ; and so my blood was later, flowing from noonday fountains, while hers ran warm and red, a pure, sole stream, which burst from out the ponderous front of dead eternity, when, with His living rod, God smote it, in the red sunrise of the gation beyond the record of modern annals. Both Jacques Cartier and John Cabot found, with astonish- ment, old Basque names everywhere, as they sailed up the coast, the date of whose connection with the geography of the shores the natives could not tell. MAMELONS. 71 world. On this her soul was set, nor could I change her thought with reason, which I vainly tried, lest if the birth should prove a boy, the shock should kill her. But she held stoutly to it, saying: " * The women of our race get what they crave. My child shall be a woman, and being so, win what she plays for.' " And, lo ! she had her wish ; for when the babe was born it was a girl. " All since is known to you, for you, by a strange fate, blown, like a cone of the high pine from the midst of whirlwinds, when forest fires are kindled and the gales made by their heat blow hot a thousand miles across the land, dropped on this island like help from Heaven. Twice was I saved from death by thee. Twice was she rescued i)—i yM.-Jt.'i«mn I i i I li II ii! t't 72 MA MELONS. at the peril of thy life ; mother and child, by thy quick hand, snatched out of death. And when the cursed fever came, and she and I lay, like two burning brands, you nursed us both, and from your arms at last, her eyes upon you lovingly, her soul unwill- ingly, under fate, went from us. And her sweet form, instinct with the old grace and passion of that vanished race which once outrivaled Heaven's beauty and won wed- lock with the gods, lay on your bosom as some rare rose, touched by untimely frost, while yet its royal bloom is opening to the sun, lies, leaf loosened, a lovely ruin rudely made on the harsh gravel walk." Here the chief stopped with a gasp, struck through and through with sharp pains. His face whitened and he groaned. The spasm MAMELONS. 73 passed, but left him weak. Rallying, with effort, he went c.i : '* I must be brief. That spasm was the second. The third will end me. God! How the old stab jumps to-night! ''Trapper, you know how wide our titles reach. A ^ indred miles from east to west, from north to south, the manor runs. It is a princely stretch. A time will come when cities will be on it, and its deeds of warranty be worth a kingdom. Would that a boy outside the deadly limits of the cross, but dashed with the old blood in vein and skin, were born to heir the place and live as mas- ter on these lakes and hills, on which the mighty chiefs who bore the Tortoise sign upon their breasts when it upheld the world, beyond the years of monal memory, lived mmmmm U I- 74 MAMELONS. and hunted ! For when the doom in the far past, before one of our blood had ever seen the salted shore, was spoken, it was said : **'This doom, for sin against the blood, shall not touch one born in the female line from sire without a cross.' ** I tell you, Trapper, a thousand chiefs of the old race would leave their graves and fight again at Mamelons to see the old doom broken, and a boy, with one clear trace of ancient blood in vein and skin, ruling as master here! And I, who die to-night, I, and he who pave me death and whom I slew, would rise to lead them ! " John Norton, you I have called ; you who have saved my life and whose life I have saved ; you, who have stood in battle \i .! MA MELONS. 75 with me when the red line wavered and we two saved the fight; you who have the wild deer's foot, the cougar's strength, whose word once given stands, like a chiefs, the test of fire; you, all white in face, all red at heart, a Tortoise, and yet a man without a cross, have I called half a thousand miles to ask with dying breath this question : " May not that boy be born, the old race kept alive, the long curse stayed, and ended with my life forever be the doom of Mame- lons? Speak, Trapper, friend, comrade in war, in hunt and hall, speak to my failing ear. that I may die exultant and tell the thousand chiefs that throng to greet me in the Spirit-land that the old doom is lifted and a race with blood of theirs in vein and Ml t ! I! li • ill 111 76 MA MELONS. skin shall live and rule forever mid their native hills ? " From the first word the strange tale, half chanted, had rolled onward like the great river flooding upward from the gulf, between narrowing banks, with swift and swifter mo- tion, growing pent and tremulous as it flows, until it challenges the base of Cape Tour- ment with thunder. And not until the dying chief, with headlong haste, had launched the query forth — the solemn query, whose answer would fix the bounds of fate forever — did the Trapper dream whither the wild tale tended. His face whitened like a dead man's, and he stood dumb — dumb with doubt and fear and shame. At last, with effort, as when one lifts a mighty weight, he said, and the words were heaved from out his chest, as great weights MA MELONS. 77 from deepest depths: ** Chief, ye know not what ye ask. My God ! I am not fit ! " Across the swarth face of the dying man there swept a flash of flame, and his glazed eyes lighted with a mighty joy. "Enough! enough! It is enough!" he cried. "The women of her race will have their way, and she will win thee. God ! If I might live to see that brave boy born, the spent fountain of the old race filled again by that rich tide in her which flows red and warm from the sunrise of the world! Nay, nay. Thou shalt not speak again. I leave it in the hands of fate. Before I pass the seeing eye will come, and I shall see if sun- light shines on Mamelons." He touched a silver bell above his head, and, after pause, the girl, in whom the beauty I rf !tfi > 78 MAMELONS, of her mother and her race lived on, whose form was Hthe, but rounded full, whose face was dark as woods, but warmly toned with the old Basque splendor, like wine when light shines through it, type of the two old- est and handsomest races of the world, stood by his side. Long gazed the chief upon her, a vision too beautiful for earth, too warm for heaven. The light of a great pride was in his eyes, but shaded with mournful pity. " Last of my race," he murmured. ** Last of my blood, farewell ! Thou hast thy mother's beauty, and not a trace of the damned cross is on thee. Follow thou thy heart. The women of thy race won so. My feet are on the endless trail blazed by my fathers for ten thousand years. I cannot tarry if I would. MAMKLONS. 79 I leave thee under care of this just man. Be thou his comfort, ar he will be thy shield. There is a chest, thy mother's dying gift, thou knowest where. Open and read, then shalt thou know. Trapper, read thou the ritual of the church above m\' bier. So shall it please thee. Thou art the only Christian I ever knew who kept his v^ord and did not cheat the red man. Some trace of the old faiths, therefore, there must be in these modern creeds, albeit the holders of them cheat and • fight each other. But, daughter of my house, last of my blood, born under shadow, and it may be unto doom, make thou my burial in the old fashion of thy race, older than mine. These modern creeds and mushroom rituals are not for us whose faiths were born when God was on the earth, and His sons married ■ 8o MA MELONS. the daughters of men. So bury me, that I may join the old-time folk who lived near neighbors to this modern God, and married their daughters to His sons." Here paused he for a space, for the old wound jumped, and life flowed with his blood. Then suddenly a change cam2 to his face. His eyes grew fixed. He placed one hand above the staring orbs, as if to help them see afar. A moment thus. Then, whisper- ing hoarsely, said : ' ''Take thou his hand. Cling to it. The old Tortoise sight at death is coming. I see the past and future. Daughter, I see thee now, and by thy side, thy arms around his neck, his arms round thee, the man without a cross ! Aye. She was right. ' The women of my race get what they crave.' Girl, thou MA MELONS. 8l hast won ! Rejoice, rejoice and sing. But, oh! my God! My God! John Norton! Look! Daughter, last of my blood, in spite of all, in spite of all, above thy head hangs, breaking black, the doom of Mamelons ! " And with these words of horror on his lips, the chief, whose bosom bore the Tortoise sio-n who killed his brother under doom at Mame- lons, fell back stone dead. So died he. Three days went by in silence. Then did the two build high his bier in the great hall, and place him on it, stripped like a warrior, to his waist, for so he charged the Trapper it should be. Thus sitting in the great chair of cedar, hewn to the fragrant heart, in the wide hall, hound at feet, the Tortoise showing plainly on his breast, a fire of great knots, gummed with odorous pitch, m 82 MA MELONS. '1 I'- blazing on the hearth, the two, each by the faith that guided, made, for the dead chief of a dead tribe, strange funeral. And first, the Trapper, standing by the bier, gazed long and steadfastly at the dead man's face. Then the girl, going to the mantel, reached for a book and placed it in his hand and stood beside him. Then, after pause, he read : ''I am the resurrection and the Life^ And the liturgy, voiced deeply and slowly read, as by one who readeth little and labors with the words, sounded through the great hall solemnly. Then the girl, standing by his side, in the splendor of her beauty, the lights shining warmly on the dark glory of her face, lifted up her voice — a voice fugitive from heaven's MA MELONS. 83 choir — and sang the words die Trapper had intoned : ''I am the resurrection and the Llfe^ And her rich tones, pure as note of hermit- thrush cleaving the still air of forest swamps ; clear as the song of morning lark singing in the dewy sky, rose to the hewn rafters and swelled against the compressing roof as if they would break out of such imprisonment, and roll their waves of sound afar and up- ward until they mingled with kindred tones in heaven. Again the Trapper : ''He -who believeth in me, though he -were dead, yet shall he live I " And again the marvellous voice pealed forth the words of everlasting hope, as if from the old race that lived in the dawn of the world, i I Hi '5fi V 84 MA MELONS, whose blood was in her rich and red, had come to her the memory of the music they had heard run thrilHng through the happy air when the stars of the morning sang together for joy. Alps, that such a voice from the old days of soul and song should lie smothered for- ever beneath the sand of Mamelons ! Thus the first part. For the Trapper, like a Christian man without cross, would give his dead friend holy burial. Then came a pause. And for a space the two sat silent in the great hall, while the pitch knots flamed and flared their splashes of red light through the gloom. Then rose the girl and took the Trapper's place at the dead man's feet. Her hair, black with a glossy blackness, swept the floor. A ? ii y ir MA MELONS. g^- jewel, large and lustrous, an heirloom of her mother's race, old as the world, burning with Atlantean flame, a miracle of stone-impris- oned fire, blazed on her brow. The laro-e gloom of her eyes was turned upon the dead man's face, and the sadness of ten thousand years of life and loss was darkly orbed within their long and heavy lashes. Her small, swarth hands hung lifeless at her side, and the bowed contour of her face drooped heavy with grief. Thus she, clothed in black cloth from head to foot, as if that old past, whose child she was, stood shrouded in her form, ready to make wail for the glory of men and the beauty of women it had seen buried forever in the silent tomb. Thus stood she for a time, as if she held communion with the grave and death. Then 1 1 I I iffi M r It 86 MAMELONS. opened she her mouth, and in the mode when song was language, she poured her feelings forth in that old tongue, which, like some fragrant fragment of sweet wood, borne north- ward by great ocean currents out of southern seas, for many days storm tossed, but lodged at last on some far shore and found by those who only sense the sweetness, but know not whence it came, lies lodged to-day upon the mountain slopes of Spain. Thus, in the old Basque tongue, sweet fibre of lost root, un- known to moderns, but soft, and sad, and wild with the joy, the love, the passion of ten thousand yeeirs, this child of the old past and the old faiths, lifted up her voice and sang : '• O death ! I hate thee ! Cold thou art and dreadful to the touch of the warm hand and the sweet lips which, drawn by love's i\\ MA MELONS. gy dear habit, stoop to kiss the mouth for the long parting. Cold, cold art thou, and at thy touch the blood of men is chilled and the sweet glow in woman's bosom frozen forever. Thou art great nature's curse. The grape hates thee. Its blood of fire can neither make thee laugh, nor sing, nor dance. The sweet flower, and the fruit which ripens on the bough, nursing its juices from the ma- ternal air, and the bird singing his love-song to his mate amid the blossoms — hate thee! At touch of thine, O slayer ! the flower fades, the fruit withers and falls, and the bird drops dumb into the grasses. Thou art the shadow on the sunshine of the world ; the skeleton at all feasts ; the marplot of great plans ; the stench which fouls all odors; the slayer of men and the murderer of women. O death ! 88 MAMKLONS. I! I I, child of an old race, last leaf from a tree that shadowed the world, warm in my youth, loving life, loving- health, loving love. O death ! how I hate thee ! " Thus she sang, her full tones swelling fuller as she sang, until her voice sent its clear challenge bravely out to the black shadow on the sunshine of the world and the dread fate she hated. Then did she a strange thing ; a rite known to the morning of the world when all the living liv^ed in the east and the dead went westward. « She took a gourd, filled to the brown brim, and placed it in the dead man's stiffened hand, then laid a rounded loaf beside his knee, and on a plate of copper at his feet — serpent edged, and in the centre a pictured island lying low and long in the blue seas, MA MELONS. 89 bold with bluff mountains toward the east, but sinking westward until it ran from sight under the ocean's rim, a marvel of old art in metal working, lost for aye — she placed a living coal, and on it, from a golden acorn at her throat, which opened at touch, she shook a dust, which, falling on the coal, burned rosy red and filled the hall with lan- guorous odors sweet as. Heaven. Then, at triumphant pose, she stood and sang : Water for thy thirst I have given, Hurry on ! hurry on ! Bread for thy hunger beside thee, Speed away! speed away! Fire for thy need at thy feet, Mighty chief, fly fast and fly far To the land where thy father and clans- men are waiting-. l^m mr i! d ri; I : 90 MA MELONS. Odor and oil for the woman thou lovest, Sweet and smooth may she be on thy breast, When her soft arms enfold thee. O death ! thou art cheated ! He shall thirst never more ; He shall eat and be filled ; The fire at his feet will revive him ; Oil and odor are his for the woman he loves; He shall live, he shall live on forever With his sires and his people. He shall love and be loved and be happy. O ! death grim and great, O ! death stark and cold, By a child of the old race that first lived And first met thee ; The race that lived first, still lives And will live forever. By the child of the old blood, by a girl ! Thou art cheated ! m CHAPTER III. i THE mother's message. "PVENING was on the woods. The girl, her mother's message in her hands, gift from the chest that owned the golden key, sat reading. And this is what she read: "My daughter: They tell me I must die. I know it, for a chill, strange to my blood, is creeping through and thickenino- in my veins. It is the old tale told from the beginning of the world — of warm blood frozen when 'tis warmest, and beauty blasted at its fullest bloom. For I am at that age when woman's nature gives most and gets most from sun and flower, from touch of 91 92 MA MELONS. I \ baby hands and man's strong love, and all the blood within her moves, tremulous with forces whose working makes her pure and sweet, as moves the strong wine in the cask when ripening its red strength and flavor. O daughter of a race that never lied save for a loved one ! blood of my blood, remem- ber that your mother died hating to die ; died when life was fullest, sweetest, fiercest in her ; for life is passionate force, and when full is fierce to crave, to seek, to have and hold, and has been so since man loved woman and by woman was beloved. And so it is with me. A woman, I crave to live, and, craving life, must die. ** Death ! how I hate thee ! What right hast thou to claim me now when I am at my sweetest? The withered and the wrin- i I \ Hr.l MELONS. 93 kled are for tlicc. For tlicc tlic colorless cheek, the shrivelled breast, the skinny hand that shakes as shakes the leaf, frost smitten to its fall, the lustreless eye, and the lone soul that looketh Ionffin<,dy ahead wIkm-c wait its loveil ones ; such are for thee, not I. For I am fair and fresh and full throusrh every vein of those quick forces, which belong to life, and hate the grave. This, that you may know your mother died unwillingly, and dying iiated death, as all of the old race and faith have ever done since he first came, a power, a mystery and a curse into the world. For in the ancient annals of our fathers it was written 'that in the begin- ning of the world there was no death, but life was all in all.' God talked with them as father talks with children; their daucrh- tr^ M 1 , i fi ii 94 MA MELONS. ters were married to His sons, and earth and heaven were one. ** Your father was of France, but also of that blood next oldest ours. He was Lenape, a branch blown from that primal tree which was the world's first growth, whose roots ran under ocean before the first world sank ; a branch blown far by fate, which, falling, struck deep into the soil of this western world, and, vital with deathless sap, grew and became a tree. This was in ancient days, when thoughts of men were writ in pictures and the round world rested on a Tortoise's back — emblem of water. For the first world was insular, and blue seas washed it from end to end, a mighty stretch, which reached from sunrise into sunset, throueh many zones. Long after men lost knowl- MAMELOA'S. 95 edge and the earth was flat, and for a thou- sand years the Tortoise symbol was an unread riddle save to us of the old blood, who knew the pictured tongue, and laughed to see the later races, mongrel in blood and rude, flatten out the globe of God until it lay flat as their ignorance. Your father was Lenape, who bore upon his breast the Tor- toise symbol of old knowledge made safe by sacredness ; for the wise men of his race, that the old fact might not be lost, but borne safely on like a dry seed blown over deserts until it comes to water, and, lodmne, finds chance to grow into a full flowered, fruitful tree, made it, when they died and knowledge passed, the Totem of his tribe. Thus the dead symbol kept the living fact alive. Nor were there lacking other proofs that his blood r. I Wi 96 MA MELONS. ! '! was one with mine, though reaching us through world-wide channels. For in his tongue, like flecks of gold in heaps of com- mon sand, were words of the old language, clear and bright with the original lustre, when gold was sacred ornament and had no vulgar use. The mongrel moderns have made it base and fouled it with dirty trade ; but in the beginning, and by those of primal blood, who knew they were of heaven, it was a sacred metal, held for God.' ^ Among man)' of the ancient races gold and silver were sacred metals, not used in commerce, but dedi- cated as votive offerings, or sent to the temples as dues to the gods. Nothing more astonished and puzzled the natives of Peru and Mexico than the eagerness with which the Spaniards sought for gold, and the high value they put upon it. A West Indian savage traded a handful of gold dust with one of the sailors with MA MELONS. 97 " We met in France, and by French custom were allied. I was a girl, and knew not my own self, and he a boy scarce twenty. Rea- sons of state there were to prompt our mar- riage, and so we were joined. He was of our old blood. That drew me, and no other thing, for love moved not within me, but nested calmly in my breast as a young bird, ere yet its wings are grown or it has thrilled with flight, rests in its downy cincture. He died at Mamelons ; died under doom. You know the tale. He died and you came, fatherless, into the world. " You are your mother's child. In face and form, in eye and every look, you are of me Columbus for some small tool, and then ran as for his life to the woods, lest the sailor should repent his bargain and demand the tool to be given back ! 11* 98 MAMELONS. and not of him. The French cross in his blood made weakness, and the stronger blood prevailed. This is the law. A turbid stream sinks with quick ebb ; the pure flows level on. The Jews prove this. The ancient wis- dom stands in them. The creed, which steals from their old faith, whatever makes it strong, has armed the world against them, but their blood triumphs. The old tide, red and true, unmixed, pure, laughs at these mongrel streams. Strong with pure strength it bides its time. The world will yet be theirs, and so the prophecy of their sacred books be met. Pure blood shall win, albeit muddy veins to-day are boasted of by fools. '* But we are older far than they. The Jews are children, while on our heads the rime of hoary time rests white as snow. Our MAiUELOiVS. 99 race was old when Egypt, sailing fr g Irom our an- stral orts, reached, as a colony, the Nile.' From tideless Sea,^ to the Green Island in the west,3 from southern Spain to Arctic zones, the old Basque banner waved ; while under Mamelons, where waits the doom for insult to pure blood, your fathers anch. -d ships from the beginning. What loss came to the earth when the gods of the old world, of whom we are, sank under sea and with them took the perfect knowledge! Alas! alas ! the chill creeps in and on and I must ' It is certain tiiat th.e Iberian race settled on the Spanish peninsuhi a long time before the Egyptians, a sister colony from the same unknown parental source, doubtless, began their marvellous structures on the Nile. ^ The Mediterranean. ^ Ireland. B'EU07!;zcA I i ii, m lOO MA MELONS. hurry ! I would make you wise before I die with a wisdom which none save the women of our race might speak or learn. '' You will read this when I am fixed among the women of our race in the great realms whc^re they are queens. For since the first the women of our race have ruled and had their way, whether for good or ill, and both have come to them and through them unto others. And so forever will it be. For beauty is a fate, and unto what 'tis set none know. The issue proves it and naught else. So be it. She who has the glory of the fate should have the courai'e to bide issue. " Your body is my body ; your face my face ; your blood my blood. The warmth of the old fires are in it, and the sweet heat which glows in you will make you under- i ! Kwaws MA MELONS. lOI Stand. You are my child, and being so, I give you of myself. I love. Love as the women of our race and only they may love. Love with a love that maketh all my life so that without it all is death to me. That love I, dying, bestow on you. It came to me like flash of fire on altar when holy oils are kin- dled and the censer swung. Here I first met him. Death had me. He fought and took me from his hand. In the beo-innino- men were large and strong, and women beautiful. Giants were on the earth, and our '^lothers wedded them. Each was a rose, thorn-guarded, and the strongest plucked her when in bloom and wore her, full of sweets, upon his bosom. Since then the women of our blood have loved laro-e men Weak ones we hated. None save the 1.11 w M I02 MAMELONS. % Ti ( i> \l P mighty, brawny, and brave have ever felt our soft arms round them, or our mouths on theirs. Thus has it been. " I loved him, for his strength was as the ancients, and with it gentleness like the gods. But he was humble, and knew not his own greatness, and, blinded by humility, he would not see that I was his. So I waited, waited as all women wait, that they may win. It is not art, but nature, the nature of a rose, which, daily opening more and more to perfect bloom in his warm light, makes the sun know his power at last. For love reveals all greatness in us, as it does all faults. Well did I know that he should see at last his fitness for me, and, without violence to himself, yield to my loveliness and be drawn within the circle of my arms. \\% MA MELONS. 103 So should I win at last, as have the women of our race won always. But death mars all. So has it been since women lived. His is the only knife whose edge may cut the silken bands we wind round men. Vain is all else. Faiths may not stand against us, nor pride, nor honor. Our power draws stronger. The grave alone makes gap 'twixt lovely woman's loving and bridal bed. So, dying thus before my time I am bereft of all. " But you shall win, for in you I shall live again and to full time. I know that you will love him, for you drew my passion to you with my milk, and all my thoughts were of him, when, with large receptive eyes, you lay a baby in my arms, day after day, scan- ning my face, love-lighted for him. Aye, you will love him. For in your sleep, I04 MAAfKUhYS. 'VI I cradled on the heart that worshiped him, its warmth for him warmed you, its beating thrilled, and from my mouth, murmured caressini^ly in dreams, your ears and tongue learned his dear name before mine own. So art thou fated unto love as I to death. Both could not v/in, iuid hence, perhaps, 'tis well I die. For had both lived, then both had loved, mother and child been rivals, and one suffered worse than dying. Nor am I without joy. For once, when I was wooing him with art he did not know, coaxing him up to me with sweet praises sweetly said, and purposely I swa}'ed so my warm body fell into his arms and there lay for a moment, vibrant, all aglow, while all my woman's soul went through my lifted and dimmed eyes to him, I saw a Hash of fire flame in his face. Its iting 11 red ngue So tcath. i, 'tis both , and am I ooing r him said, body )ment, s soul yes to 3 face, MA MELONS. and felt a throb jump through his body, as the God woke in him, which told me he was mortal. And, faint with joy, I slid down- ward from his arms and in the fragrant grasses sat, throbbing, covering up my face with happy hands lest he should see the glory of it and be frightened at what his touch had done. I swear by the old blood, that moment's triumph honored, that the memory of that blissful time takes from death its sting and robs the grave of victory, as I lie dying. " Yea, thou shalt win. The power will be in thee, as it has been in me, to win him or any whom women made as we set heart on. But woo him with that old art of innocence, -snow white, though hot as fire, lost to the weak or brazen women of these mongrel t5 'II f:M , iilJJ io6 MAMELONS, f: ii 1 1 races that fill the world to-day, who dare not dare, or daring^, overdo. Be slow as sunrise. Let thy love dawn on him as morning dawns upon the earth, and warmth and light grow evenly, lest the quick flash blind him, or the sudden heat appall, and he see nothing right, but shrink from thee and his new self as from a wicked thing. I may not help thee. What fools these moderns are to think so. The dead have their own lives and loves, and note not the living. Else none might be at peace or know comfort above the sky, and all souls would make wail for wrongs and woes done and borne under sun. So is it well that parting should be parting, and what wall divides the dead from living be beyond pen- etration. For each woman's life is sole. Her plans are hidden with her love. Her skill is MAMELONS. 107 of it a sweet secrecy, a„<| all l,er winning is self- won. I do not fear. Thou wilt have the wooing wisdom of thy race. Thy eyes are such as men give life to look into. The pas- sion in thy blood would purchase thrones. . Thou hast the grace of form which maddens men. Thy voice is music. Thy touch warm velvet to the skin. The first and perfect woman lives complete, in thee! " No more. In the old land no one is left. The modern cancer eats all there. New fash- ions and new faiths crowd in. Only low blood is left, and that soon yields to pelf and pain. Last am I of the queenly line and thou art last of me. I came of gods. To gods I go. The tree that bore the fruit of knowledge for our se.. in the sunrise of the world is stripped to the last sweet leaf. If thou shalt die leav- io8 MA MELONS, ing no root, the race God made is ended. With thee the gods quit earth, and the old red blood beats back and upward to the skies. Gold hast thou arid broad acres. Youth and health are thine. Win his great strength to thee, for he is pure as strong, and from a primal man get perfect children, that in this new world in the west a new race may arise rich in old blood, born among the hills, strong with the strength of trees, whose sons shall be as mountains, and whose daughters as the lakes, whose loveliness is lovelier because of the reflected mountains dimly seen in them. '•' Farewell. Love greatly. It is the only way that leadeth woman to her heaven. The moderns have a saying in their creed that God is love. In the beginning he was F'ather. The race that sprang from Him said that, I ■m MAMELONS. 109 and said no more. It was enough. Love then was human, and we gloried in it. Not the pale love of barren nun, but love red as the rose, warm as the sun, the love of moth- erly women, sweet mouthed, deep breasted vcced with cradle songs and soft melodies which made men love their homes. Love thou and live on the old level. Be not ashamed to be full woman. Love strength Bear children to it. Be mother of a mighty race born for this western world. Multiply Inherrt ; and send the old blood flowing from thy veins, a widening current, thrilling through the ages ; that it may be as red, as pure, as strong at sunset as it was in the sunrise of the world. "Once more, farewell, sweet daughter These are last words, a voice from out the I '1 !' I 1 ■! 111 I lO MAMELONS. sunset, sweet and low as altar hymn wan- dering down the columned aisles of some old temple. So may it sound to thee. So live, so woo, so win, that when thou comest through the portals of the west to that fair throne amid those other ones which stretch their stateliness across the endless plain of ended things, which waits for thee as one has waited for every woman of our queenly line, thou shalt leave behind at going a new and noble race, from thee and him, in which the east and west, the sunrise and the sun- set of the world shall, like two equal glories, meet condensed and shine. So fare thee well. Fear not Mamelons. For if thou fail- est there, thou shalt be free of fault, and all the myriad millions of our blood shall out of sunset march, and from the shining sands MAMELONS. Ill of fate lift thee high and place thee on the last, the highest, and the whitest throne of our old line. So ends it. One more sweet kiss, sweet one. One more long look into his face — grave, grave and sad he gazeth at me. God! What a face he has! Shall I find match for it to-morrow when I stand, amid the royal, beyond sunset? Perhaps. Death, you have good breeding. You have waited well. Come, now, I will go on with thee. Yes, yes, I see the way. 'Tis very plain. It has been hollowed by so many feet. Good-bye to earthly light and life. It may be I shall find a better. I'll know to- morrow." Here the scroll ended. Long the living sat pondering what the dead had writ. She kissed the writing as it were holy text. Then ) ! ■ m '!7' t I tl IK w II 112 MAMELONS. placed it in the chest, and turned the golden key and said : " Sweet mother, thou shalt live in me. Our race shall not die out. My love shall win him." Then went she to the great room wherein the Trapper by the red fire sat and said : " John Norton, thou art my guest. What may I do to pleasure thee ? Here thou must stay until my mind can order out my life and make the dubious road ahead look plain. While underneath my roof, I pray, command me." All this with such grave dignity and sweet grace as she were queen and he some kins- man, great and wise. The Trapper stooped and lifted a huge log upon the fire, which broke the lower brands. The chimney roared, and the large room bright- ened to the flame. Then, facing her, he said : MAMELONS. •13 "Guest I am and servant, both Jn one and must be so awhile. Winter is on us' The fire feels snow. It putters as if the flakes were falling in it. It ,-3 a si„„ th-it never lies. Hark - you can hear the konk of geese as they wedge southward. The wmter will be long, but I must stay." "And are you sorry you must stay?" re plied the girl. <. I ,;,! do what I n.ay to make the days and nights pass swiftly." " ^^^' "^>'' >'°" do mistake," returned the Trapper. « I am not sorry for myself, but Aee. If I may only help thee : how can I help thee.?" "John Norton," replied the girl, and she spoke with sweet earnestness as when the heart is vocal, " thou art a man, and wise • I am a girl, and know nought save books M \ ) i II \ ■ i M 114 MA MELONS. But you, you have seen many men and tribes of men ; counciled with chiefs, been comrade with the great, sharing their inner thoughts in peace and war, and thou hast done great deeds thyself, of which fame speaks widely. Why do you cheapen your own value so, mg thyself a common man? My uncle said you were the best, the bravest, and the wisest man he ever met, and he had sat with kings and chiefs, and heard the best men of both worlds tell all they knew. Dear friend, wilt thou not be my teacher, and teach me that, which licth now, like treasure hidden, locked in thy silence?" " I teach thee ! " exclaimed the Trapper. ** I, an unlettered man, a hunter of the woods, teach one who readeth every tongue, who knoweth all the past, to the beginning MAMELONS. ^ ^ of the world, whose licad has i„ it all these shelves of knowledge," and the Trapper svvept a gesture toward the thousand books that thickened the great hall from floor to ceiling. "I teach thee!" " Ves, you," answered the girl. " You can teach me, or any woman that ever lived, or any man. For you were given at your birth the seeing eye, the listening ear, and the still patience of the mountain cat, which on the bare bough sits watching, from sunset until sunrise, motionless. In the old days such gifts meant wisdom, wider, deeper, more exact than that of books, for so my mother often told me. She said the wisest men who ever lived were those who, in deep woods and caves and on the shore of seas, saw, heard, and pondered on the life and [ ' I • y 'If '1^ i Ul: if JT ii6 MAMELONS. mysteries of nature, noting- all things, small and great, cause and effect, tracing out con- nections which interlace the parts into one whole, so making one solid woof of knowl- edge, covering all the world of fact and substance in the end. And once, when you were in the mood, and had been talking in the hall, drawn on and out by her, you told of climes and places you had seen, and strange things met in wandering, of great mounds buiiJed by some ancient race, long dead ; of cities, under sunset, still standing solid, without men ; of tall and shapely pil- lars, writ with mystic characters, on the far shore of the mild sea, whence sailed the old dead of my race, at clying, far away to west- ern heavens, where to-day they live ; of caverns in deep earth, made glorious with MAMELOXS. "7 ■ crystals, stalactites, prisms, and shining orna- ments, where, in old time the gods of the under world were chambered ; of trees that mingled bloom and fruitage the Ion. year through, and flowers that never faded "" "'^ '■°°' ^^^ -'■• of creeping reptiles, snakes, and savage poisonous things that struck to kill, and of their antidotes, grow- 'ng for man and beast amid the very grasses where they secreted venom ; of rivers wide and deep, boiling up through solid earth full-tided, which, flowing widely on, dropped' suddenly like a plummet to the centre of A- world ; of plains, fenced by the sky, far reaching as the level sea, so that the red sun rose and set in P-rasses - c^^ f. grasses, ot fires which, ht stars with smoke by lightning, blackened the and burned all the world ; of '\^. \\ i i oceans in the afi'^ \\ . ! in > IS ill !■ ifs I tmmm ii8 MAMELOXS. \ ii west, which, flowing- with joint floods, fell over mountains, plunging their weights of water sheer downward, so that the rocky framework of the round earth shook ; of winds that blew as out of chaos, revolving on a hollow axis like a wheel buzzing, invis- ible, charged to the centre with electric force, and fires which burst explosive, kindling the air like tinder ; and of ten thousand mar- vels and curious things, which you have met, noted, and pondered on, seeking to know the primal fact or force which underlaid them. So that my mother said that night, when we were in our chamber, that you were the wisest man she ever met ; wise with the wisdom of her ancient folk, whose knowl- edge lived, oral and terse, before the habit of bookmaking came to rive the solid sub- MAMELONS. stance, heavy and rich, into thin veneer, to make vain show for fools to wonder at Teach nie! Who might thou not teach thou seeing, silent man, type of my fi„t fathers who, gifted with rare senses and with w.t to question nature and to learn mastered all wisdom before books were." " Aye, aye," returned the Trapper, not dis- pleased to hear her praise as rare what seemed to him so common, "these things I know in truth, for I have wandered far seen much, and noted closely, and he who sleeps in woods has time to think. But. girl. I am an unlearned man, and know' naught of books." " Books ! " exclaimed the girl. <- What are books but oral knowledge spread out i„ words which lack the fire of forceful utter- ■'! .tl^ I 20 MAMKLOAS. Rut ihall ki thci The ance r init you snail know ter clays arc short, the nights are long ; our toil is simple ; wood for the fire, food fc^r the table, and a swift push each t ^ along the snow for exercise ; or, if the winds will keep some acres clean, our skates shall ring to the smitten ice, piercing it with treml)lings till all the shores cry out. All other hours for sleep and books. I read in seven tongues, one so old that none save ^ in all the world can read it ; for it was \» . . when letters were a mystery, known only unto those who fed the sacred fire and kept God's altars warm. And I will read you all the wisdom of the world, and its rare laughter, which, mother said, was the fine effervesce of wisdom, the pungent foam and sparkle of it. So you shall know. And one old III.' I MA MELONS. T2I scroll there is, rollecl in foil of jjold, scaled I ter, see \le old ith the uil. 'mbol of serpent seal, symbol ot eternity, scribed with pictured knovvledc^e, an heirloom of my race, whose key alone I have, writ in rainbow colors, when the world was young, the language of the gods, who first made signs for speech and put the speaking mouth upon a page. It was the first I learned. My mother taught it to me standing at her knee — for so the law says it shall be done, a law old with twice ten thousand years of age — that he who knows this scroll shall teach it, under silence, to his or her first born, standing at knee, that the old knowl- edge of prime things and days may not perish from the earth it tells of, but live on forever while the earth endures. For on it is the record of the beginning, told by those 11 1 ,( »«r M 122 MAMELONS. who saw it ; of the first man and how he came to be ; of woman, first, when born and of what style. A list of healing simples, antidotes 'gainst death, and of rare oils which search the bones and members of the mor- tal frame and banish pain ; and others yet, sweet to the nose, and volatile, that make the face to shine, for feasts and happy days, and being poured on women, make their skin softer than down, whiter than drifted snow, and so clean and clear that the rich blood pinks through it like a red rose centred in crystal. And on it, too, is written other and strange rules, wild and weird. How one may have the seeing eye come to him. How to call up the wicked dead from under ground, and summon from their heaven in the west, where they live and love, the I l^AMELOJVS. blessed. How marrla^re cme .. -™. What part ,•; J """ ""'' P- hers tha '^ '° "' ^"' ^^''- and sh "'' '^ ^ J"°y ^° °*er, ' t' ^'"^ ''— d. be as sweet slip r r:' -^"^ '^^'^^ °^ ^^^« ^^e o,d z. W. chndren, health,, ra,V, and stron, a : \^^" ''- -^■■— e read, J;: W'th sharpened thouj^ht mav KV u the vital eist d '■""^'^ '° g'st, deep centred within the hard nnd of words, and taste the If ■ of true sense So !!^ " '""^ ^^^^^-ss <-"-^e. So wdl we teach each other and jrrow wise equally ■ , ->«<= of th,n.s and places you ,,ave seen • • ^'°" '"'^ '^"-'-'^- -it in books that I have read." ^ •I ■ il M [J il Ifl ] '5 I y\\ I 1 i ' I: i Hi fmp i a: ■• i CHAPTER IV. LOVES VICTORY. IV TEXT day, the Trapper's sign proved true. Winter fell whitely on the world. Its soft fleece floated downward to the earth whiter than washed wools. The waters of the lake blackened in contrast to the shores. The flying leaves — tardy vagrants from the branch — were smothered 'mid. the flakes, and dropped like shot birds. Toward night the wind arose. The forest moaned. At sunset, in the gray gloom, a flock of ducks roared southward through the whirling storm. A field of geese, leaderless, bewildered, blinded by the driving flakes, scented water, and, like a noisy mob, 124 ^'^fAA/ELOAS. fell, With a mighty splash, J25 - ' ^nto the lake Summer went with the day, and with the n.ght can,e winter, white, cold, and stormy roanng violently through the air. '" "^« g-at hall sat the two. The logs - the wide hearth piled high, glowed red - a solid coal from end to end. cracked with concentric rings. They reddened the hall books, skins, and antlered trophies of the' ; "• '^' '''°"S man and the girls dark face stood forth in the warm luminance, pre- Raphaelite. The Trapper sat in a great chair. bu.It solidly of rounded w.od. untouched by tool, but softly cushioned. The rrlH . '■"'^ g'n, recum- -t. rested on a pile of skins, black with '" ^'-y blackness of the bear, full furred. ;i '""• ' ^-"^' -'-t. from the looms of France. Her moccasins, snow white. On f| I i^ym »BB r ! 1 126 MAMELOiXiS. ' I if either wrist a serpent coil of gold. A dia- mond at her throat. A red fez on her head, while over her rich dress the glossy masses of her hair fell tangled to her feet. She read from an old book, bound with rich plush, whose leaves were vellum, edged with artful garniture and lettered richly with crimson ink — a precious relic of old literature, saved from those vandal flames w^hich burned the stored knowledge of the world to ashes at Alexan- dria. The characters were Phcenician, and told the story of that race to which we owe our modern alphabet ; whose ships, a thou- sand years before the Christ, went freighted with letters, seeking baser commerce, to every shore of the wide world. She read by the fire's red light, and the ruddy glow fell viv- idly on the pictured page, the rich dress out- ^^lAMELOA^. 127 I'nmg her ful, fo™ ,„, ,,, ^^^^^^.^ ^^^^ of'^erface. It was the sto^ of ,„ ,„ ^^^^ -no library has it now-the story of their nse. their glory, and their fall. She read for hours, pausing here and there to tell her lis tener of connecting things -of Ro^e that was not then ; of Greece yet to be born ; of Egypt, swarming on the Nile and building monuments for eternity, and of her ancient -e. west of the tideless sea, whose annals even then, reached backward through ten thousand years, thus making clear what other- wise were dark, and teaching him all history So passed the hours till midnight struck Then she arose, and lifting goblet half-filled w|th water, poured it on the hearth, saying- " ' 'P'" *'^ "^'- t" a race whose goin^ emptied half the world." This solemnly for i E): % I i m -^- -I .It'i t ■ >il l! ' r . i' J 1 ■I 1 li If 128 MAMELONS. she was of the past, and held to its old fash- ions, knowing all its symbolism, its rites, its daily customs, and what they meant, for so she had been taught, and nothing else, by her whose blood and beauty she repeated. Then took the Trapper's hand and laid it on her head, bent low, and said : " Dear friend, I am so glad to serve you. I have enjoyed this night beyond all nights I ever knew. I hope for many others like to it, and even sweeter." And saying this she looked with glad and peaceful eyes into his face, and glided noiselessly from the room. The Trapper piled high the logs again, and, lying down upon the skins where she had lain, gazed with wide eyes into the coals. The gray was in the sky before he slept, and in his sleep he murmured; "It cannot be. I 5 I MAMELON^\ 129 am an unlearned man and poor. I am not fit." Above him in lier clwmber, nestling i„ sleep, the girl sighed in her dreams and murmured ; '• How blind he is ! " And then : "My love shall win him!" Dear girl, sweet soul of womanhood, gift to these gilded days from the old solid past, I would the thought had never come to me' to tell this tale of Mamelons ! So went the winter ; and so the two grew upward side by side in knowledge. He learning of the past as taught in books ; of men long dead whose names had been un- known to him ; of deeds done by the mighty of the world; of cities, monuments, tombs long buried ; of races who mastered the world and died mastered by their own ^veaknesses ; of faiths, philosophies, and creeds once bright ." h J'' :i I' \ % f I / Ul 130 MAMELO.XS. and strong as fire, now cold and weak as sodden ashes ; of vanished rites and mysteries and lost arts which once were the world's wonder — all were unfolded to him, so that his strong mind grasped the main point of each and understood the whole. And she learned much from him ; of bird and beast and fish ; of climates and their growths ; of rocks and trees ; of nature's signs and move- ments by day and night ; of wandering tribes and mongrel races ; the lore of woods and waters and the differences in governments which shape the lives of mon. So taught they each the other ; she, swift of thought and full of eastern fire ; he, slower minded, but calm, sagacious, comprehensive, remem- bering all and settling all in wise conclusion. Two better halves, in mind and soul and 131 body, to make a perfect whole, were never brought by fate togetl,er since God made -ale and female. The past and present, fire and wood, fancy and judgment, beauty to w.n and strength to hold, sound minds in sound bodies, the perfect womanhood and man- hood ideal, typical, met, conjoined i,i them. Slowly she won him. Slowly she drew him. with the innocence of loving, to one- ness in wish and thought and feeling, with her sweet self. Slowly, as the moon lifts the great tide, she lifted him toward her, until his nature stood highest, full flooded' nigh, bathed in all the wide, deep flowing of its greatness, in her white radiance. It was an angel's mission, and all the wild passion of her blood, original, barbaric, was sobered with reverent thought of the great destiny i i li r ji i' 1 h 1 ill H^^ V l\ 132 MA MELONS. I if that she, wedded to him, stood heir to. She had no other hope, nor wish, nor dream, than to be his. She was all woman. This life was all to her. She had no future. If she had, she wisely put it by until she came to it. She took no thought of far to-morrow. Sufficient for the day was the joy or sorrow of it. She lived. She loved. That was enough. What more might be to woman than to live, to love, worship her husband and bear children ? Such life were heaven. If other heaven there were she could not crave it, being satisfied. So felt she. So had she felt. So acted that it might be ; and now, at last, she stood on that white line each perfect woman climbs to, passing which, radiant, content, grateful, she enters — heaven. / MA MELONS. Spring came. Heat touched the snow, and it grew liquid. The hill.s murmured as with many tongues, and low music flowed rippling down their sides. The warm earth sweetened with odors. Sap stirred in root and bough, and the fibred sod thrilled with delicious pas- sages of new life. From the far South came flaming plumage breasts of gold and winged music to the groves. The pent roots of herbs, spiced and pungent, burst upward through the moistened mould, and breathed wild, gamy odors through the woods. The skeleton trees thickened with leaf formations, and hid their naked grayness under green and gold. Each day birds of passage, pressed by parental instinct, slanted wings toward the lake, and, sailing inward, to secluded bays, made haste to search for i .! i I ■M } '• n« i: ,1' I 134 MAMELONS. ifS^ nests. Mothnr otters swam heavy through the tide, and the great turtles, himbcring from the water, digged deep pits under starlight, in the sand, and cunningly piled their pyra- mid of eggs. All nature loved and mated, each class of life in its own order, and God began the re-creation of the world. The two were standing under leafy screen on the lake's shore, the warm sun overhead and the wide water lying level at their feet. Nature's mood was on them, and their hearts, like equal atmospheres, flowed to sweet union. Reverently they spoke, as soul to soul, concealing nothing, having nothing to conceal, of their deep feeling and of duty unto each. The girl held up her clean, sweet nature unto him, that he might ^' it, wholly his forever ; and he kept notL g back, ohe il I MA MELONS. 135 knew he loved her, and to her the task to make him feel the honor she received in being loved by him. So stood they, alone ■n the deep woods, apart from men, in grave sweet counsel. Thus spake the man : " ' '°^° y°"- Ada ; you know it. I would lay down my life for you. But our marriage may not be. I am too old." " Too old ! " replied the girl. .- Thou hast seen forty years, I twenty. Thou art the riper, sweeter, better; that is all. I would not wed a boy. The women of our race have wedded men. big bodied, strong to fight, to save, to make home safe, their coun- try free, and fame, that richest heritage to children. My mother broke the rule, and rued it. She might have rued it worse had death not cut the tightening error which I !;) I • ^4 r 136 MAMELONS. knotted her to comingr torture. My heart holds hard to the old law made for the women of our race by ancient wisdom ; * Wed not boys, but wed grave and gentle men. For women would be ruled, and who, of pride and fire, would be ruled by strip- lings ? ' And again : * Let ivy seek the full- grown oak, nor cling to saplings.' I love the laws that were, love the old faiths and customs. They filled the world with beauty and brave men. They gave great nature opportunity to keep great, kept noble blood from base, strength from wedding weakness, and barred out mongrelism from the world, which in the ancient days was deadliest sin, corrupting all. O love! you do mistake, saying * I am too old.' For women have ever the child's habit in them. They love MAAIELOAS. j,y to be held in arms, love to look up to lov- ing eyes, love to be commanded, and obey strong sovereignty. The husband is head- head of the house. He sits in wide au- thority, and from his wisdom flow counsel, command, which all the house, wife, children, and servants, bend to, obedient. How can a stripling fill such seat ? How sit such dig- nity on a beardless face? How, save from seasoned strength, such safety come to all ? O full grown man! be oak to me, and let me twine my weakness round tliy streno-th that I may find safe lodgment, nor be shaken in my roots when storms blow strong. Too old ! I would thy head were sown with the white rime of added years. So should I love thee more ! " Ah me, such pleading from love's mouth. 11 ':.. 1' > 11 1 If y. !i i ii ■ I ij m . it ill % mm li i' n 138 MAMELONS, such sweet entreaty from love's heart man never heard before, in these raw days, when callow youth is fondled by weak women, and boys with starting beards push wisdom, gray and grave, from council chairs. Then, in reply, the Trapper said : ** Atla, it cannot be. I will admit that you say, sooth, my years do not forbid. Boys are rash, hot-headed, quick of tongue, ill-mannered, lacking patience, just sense, and slow-mannered gentleness which comes with added years, and that deep knowledge which slows blood and gentles speech, and I do see that you fit well to these, and would be happier with a man thus charactered. But, letting that go by — and all my heart is grateful that it may — still marriage may not be between us, for thou art rich and I am MAMELONS. 139 poor, and so it should not be. For husband should own house; the wife make home. What say you, am I right or wrong?" To which the girl made answer: ''Thou art an old-time man, John Norton, and this judg- ment fits the ancient wisdom. For in the beginning so it was. The male built nest, the female feathered it with song. So each had part in common ministry. The man was greater, richer, than the woman, and with earthly substance did endow. And she in turn gave sweet companionship, and sang loneliness from his life with mother songs and children's prattle. Thus in the begin- liing. Yea, thou art right, as thou art always right. For, being sound in heart and head, thou canst not err. Thy judgment goes straight to the centre of the truth as goes thy n if 11 1! ; 1: is ii:: i l»:.' ' ■ ■ m n'w—''^^w»yw^w»ipw—iipp|P"WiW mmmmmimmmiimiiiim. / 140 MA MELONS. bullet. But as men lived and died, change came to the first order. For men without male issue died and left great dower to girls. Women, by no fault of theirs, nor ^ lack of modesty, grew rich by gifts of death, which are the gifts of fate. And changing circum- stance changed all, making the old law void. The gods pondered, and a new order rose. By chance, at first, then by ordainment, roy- alty left male and followed female blood, be- cause their blood was truer to itself, less vagrant, purer, better kept. And women of red blood and pure, clothed in royalty from shame, made alliances with men whom their souls loved, and gave rank, wealth, and their sweet selves in lavishness of loving, which gives all and keeps nothing back. Such was the habit of my race and line from age to MAMELOAS. 141 age, even as I read you from the pictured scroll, rolled in foil of gold, that only I, of all the world, can read ; and if I die, leaving no child, the golden secret goes with me to the gods, and all the ancient lore is lost to men forever. This to assist your judgment and make the scales hang level from your hand for just decision. Am I to blame be- cause I stand as heir to ancient blood and wealth 1 Shall these wide acres, gold in yon- der house, gems in casket, and diamonds worn for ten thousand years by women of my race, queens of the olden time, when in their hands they lifted world-wide sceptres, divide thee and me ? Has love no weight in the just scales you, by the working of some old fate, I know not what, hold over me and my soul's wish to-day? Be just to your own i ■ !; '- ,i fl *( H * ii K i / 'i i .< I ;.|; 142 MA MELONS. soul, be just to mine, and fling these doubts aside as settled forever by the mighty Power that works in darkness, and through darkness, to the light, shaping our fates and ordering life and death, joy and grief, beyond our power to fix or change. Blown by two winds, whose coming and going we list not, we, two, meet here. Strong art thou and I am weak, but shall thy strength repel my weakness? Rich, without fault, I am. My blood is older than these hills, purer than yonder water, and wilt thou make an accident, light as a feather ir just balances, outweigh a fact sweet as heaven, heavy as fatp ? The queens of old, whose blood is one with mine, who spake the self-same tongue and loved the self-same way, chose men to be their kings ; so I, by the same law, choose thee. Be thou my king. / MA MELONS. 143 Rule me in love. By the old right and rule of all my race, I place thy hand upon my head, and so pass under yoke. I am thy subject, and all my days shall be a sweet subjection. Do with me as thou wilt. I make no terms. My feet shall walk with thine to the dark edge of death. Further I know not. This life we may make sure. The next is or is not ours to order. . No man may say. Lord of my earthly life, take me, take me to thy arms, that I, last of an old race, last of its blood, left sole in all the world, with- out father, mother, friend, may feel I am be- loved by him I worship, and drink one glad, sweet cup before I go to touch the bitter edge of dubious chance at Mamelons." Then love prevailed. Doubt went from out his soul. His nature, unrestrained. i ii; i ii. I / \ t i) i I 'i ' X 144 MA MELONS. leaped up in a red rush of joy to eyes and face. He lifted hands and opened arms to her. To them she swept, as bird into safe thicket, chased by hawk, with a glad cry. Panting she lay upon his bosom, trembling through all her frame, placed mouth to his and lost all sense but feeling. Then, with a gasp, drew back and lifted dewy eyes to his, as fed child to nursing mother's face, or saint her worshiping gaze to God. But the gods of her old I'ace, standing beyond sunset, lifted high, saw, farther on, the sandy slope of Mamelo7is, and, while she lay in heaven on her lover s breast, they bent low their heads and wept. • • • • • • • •' Spring multiplied its days and growths. Night followed night as star follows star in MAMELONS. . . . their far circuits, wheeling forever on. Each morn brought sweet surprise to each. For like the growths of nature so grew their love fuller with bloom each morn ; with fragrance fuller each dewy night. Her nature, under love's warmth, grew richer, seeding at its core for sweeter, larger life. His borrowed tone and color from her own, and fragrance. So, in the happy days of the long spring, as earth grew warmer, sweeter with the days, the two grew, with common growth and closer, urttil they stood in primal unity, no longer twain, but one. One day she came, and put her hand in his and said : " Dear love, there is an old rite by which my people married. It bindeth to the grave; no farther. For there the old faith I ;i ; !L ■I ; if '):* I f ii I If / 146 MA MELONS. Stopped, not knowing what life might be beyond, or by whom ordered. Thine goeth on through death as Hght through darkness, and hokis the hope that earthly union lasts forever. It may be so. Perhaps the Gali- lean knew better than the gods what is with- in the veil, for so the symbol is. It is a winning faith. My heart accepts it as a happy chance ; and, did it not, it would not matter. Thy faith is mine, and thine shall be my God. Perchance the ancient deities and your modern One are but the same, with different names. We worshiped ours with fruits and flowers and incense ; with dancing feet, glad songs, and altars garlanded with flowers ; moistened with wine ; you, yours with dole- ful music, bare rites, the beggary of petition and cold reasoning. Ours was the better MAMELONS. j,- fashion, for it kept the happy habits up of children, gladly grateful for father gifts, and so prolonged the joyous childhood of the world. But in this thy faith is better — it hangs a star above the tide of death for love to steer by. My heart accepts the sign. Thy faith is mine. We will go down to Mamelons, and there be married by the holy man who wears upon his breast the sign you trust to." "Nay, nay; it shall not be," exclaimed the Trapper. - Atla, thou shalt not go to Mamelons. There waits the doom for the mixed blood. There died thy father, and all its sands are full of moldering men. We will be married here by the old custom of thy people, and God, who looketh at the heart and knoweth all, will bless us." : 1 1 I ^ I4S MA MELONS. " Dear love," returned the girl, '* thy word is law to me. I have no other. It shall be as thou wilt. But listen to my folly or my wisdom, I know not which it is : I fear not Mamelons. There is no coward blood in me. The women of our race face fate with open eyes. So it has been from the begin- ning. Death sees no pallor in our cheeks. To love we say farewell, then graveward go with steady steps. The women of my house — a lengthy line, stretching downward from the past beyond annals — whose blood flows red in me, lived queens, and, dying, died as they lived. I would die so ; lest, if thy faith is true, they would not own me kin nor give me place among them when I came, if I feared fate or death. Besides, the doom may not hold good toward me. I know my uncle AfAM/CLOXS. 149 saw the sight ; but he was only 1 ortoise, a branch blown far from the old tree and lost a thousand years amid strange peoples, and his sight could not, therefore, be sure. Moreover, love, if the curse holds, and I am under doom, how may I escape? For fate is fate, and he who runs, runs quickest into it. So let us go, I pray, to Mame- Ions, and there be married by the holy man, the symbol ' on whose breast was known to our old race and carved on altars ten thou- sand years before the simple Jew was born * The cross as a symbol is traceable through all the old rnces, even the remotest in point of time. It was originally a symbol of plenty and joy, and so stood emblematic of happiness for tens of thousands of years. The Romans connected it with their criminal law, as we have the gallows, and so it became a symbol of shame and sorrow. ill rf PI ^50 MAMELONS, at Bethlehem. So shall the symbol of the old faith and the new be for the first time kissed by two who represent the sunrise and the sunset of the woi'ld ; and the god of morning and of evening be proved to be the same, though worshiped under different names." He yielded, and the two made ready to set face toward Mamelons. There was, serving in her house, an old red servitor, who had been chief, in other days, of Mistassinni.' His dwindled tribe ^ This lake lies to the northwest of Lake St. John some 300 miles, and within some 200 miles of James' Bay. It was first discovered by white men in the person of Pbre Abanel, in 1661, a Jesuit missionary, en route to Hudson's Bay. This is the lake about which so much has been said in Canada and the States, and so much printed. In fact, 'very little is accurately known of it, ■III is ill MAMELONS. , . j lives still upon the lake which reaches north- ward beyond knowledge. But he, longer than her 'ife, had lived in the great house, unless we assume that the late survey by Mr. Low is to be regarded as a settlement of the matter -which few, if any, acquainted with the Mistassinni question would do. Having exammed all the data bearing on the subject, I can but conclude that the bit of water which Mr. Low said he surveyed was only a small arm or branch of the lake reaching south from it. and tha. the Great Mistassinni itself was never seen by Mr Low, much less surveyed. Unless we concluded with an ancient cynic that "All men are liars," then there surely is a vast body of water known to the natives as Big Mistassinni, lying in the wilderness several hun- dreds of miles from Hudson's Bay, yet to be visiie.l and surveyed by white men. Mista, in Indian dialect means great, and sinni means a stone or rock. And hence Mistassinni means the " Lake of Great Stone, or Rocks." The Assinniboine, ,,r Rocky River, Indians of the West were evidently of the same blood and Ian- guage originally with these red men of the northern wilds Ml •1 \\\ A» %\ I! I '-. .'.I ; ;■ 152 MA MELONS. a life-long guest, but serving it in his wild fashion. Warring with Nasquapees and Moun- taineers against the Esquimaux, he had been overcome in ambush and in the centre of their camp put to the torture. Grimly he stood the test of fire, not making moan a' their knives seamed him and the heated spear points seared. Maddened, one pried his jaws apart with edge of hatchet, and tore his tongue out, saying, in devilish jest, " If (lica wilt not talk, thou hast no need of this," and ate it before his eyes. Then the Chief, with twice a hundred braves, burst in upon them, and whirled the hellish brood, in roaring battle, out of the world. The Trapper, plunging through whirring hatchets and red spear points, sent the cursed fagots flying that blazed upward to his bloody mouth and ■ j?_i — Ji*. 13 MAMELONS. 153 SO saved him to the world. Crippled beyond hope of leadership, he left his tribe, and, toiling slowly through the woods, came to the Chief in the great house and said, in the quick language of silent signs : " I am no longer chief — I cannot fight. Let me stay here imtil I die." Thus came he, and so stayed, keeping, through many years, the larder full of game and fish. This wrinkled withered man went with them, paddling his birch slowly on, deep ladened with needed stuffs and precious things for dress and orna- ment at the marriage. For she said : '* I will put on the raiment of my race when my foremothers reigned o'er half the world, and their banners, woven of cloth of gold, dark, with an emerald island at the centre, waved over ships which bore the trident at their i54 MA MELONS. [I (■ I * bows, their sailors anchored under Mamclons a thousand and a thousand years before Spain sjDrang a mushroom from the old Iberian mold. I will stand or fall forever, Queen at Mamelons." So said she, and so meant. For all her blood thrilled with the haughty cour- age of that past, when fate was faced with open, steady eyes, and the god Death, that moderns tremble at, was met by men who gazed into his gloomy orbs with haughty stare as he came blackening on. So silently the silent man went on in his light bark, loaded with robes, heavy with flowered gold, woven of old in looms whose soft movements, going deftly to and fro, sound no more, leav- ing no ripple as it went, steered by his withered hands, down the black rivers of the north, toward feast or funeral under Mamelons. m CHAPTER V. AT MAMELONS. OUMMER was at its hottest. The woods, ^^ sweltering under heavy heat, sweat odors from every gummy pore. Flowers, unless water-rooted, withered on their stalks. The lumberino- moose came to the streams and stayed. The hot hills drove him down. The feathered mothers of the streams led down their downy progeny to wider waters. The days were hot as ovens and the nights dew- less. The soft sky hardened and shone brazen from pole to pole. The poplar leaves shrank from their trcn\bling twigs and the birches shriveled in the heat. But on the 155 ^1 ■56 MAMF.LONS. ^' I ! il, < I'i' rivers the air was moist and cool, lily-sweet- ened, and above their heads, at night, the yel- low stars swung- in their courses like golden globes, large, soft, and round. So the two boats went on through lovely lakes, floating slowly down the flowing rivers without hap or hazard, till they came to the last portage, beyond which flowed the Stygian' river, whose gloomy tide flows out of death into bright life at Mamelons. The^ took the shortest trail. Straight up it ran over the mighty ridge which down- ward slopes on the far side, eastward to that ^ The waters of the S.iguenay are unlike those of any other river known. They are a purple-brown, and, looked at en masse, are, to the eye, almost black. This peculiar color gives it a most gloomy and grewsomc look, and serves to vastly deepen the profound impression as other peculiar characteristics make upon the mind. a i i 1.1 MA MELONS. 157 Strange bay men call Eternity. It was an old trail only ran by runners who ran for life and death when war blazed suddenly and tribes were summoned in hot haste to rally. But she was happy hearted, and, half jesting, half in earnest, said : " Take the short trail. My heart is like a bird flying long kept from home. Let me go straight." So on the trail the two men toiled all day, while she played with the sands upon the shore and crowned herself with lilies, saying: **The queens of my old line loved lilies. I will have lily at my throat when I am wed." So, when night had come, the boats and all their lading were on the other side, and they were on the ridge, which sloped either way, the sunset at their backs, the gloomy gorge ahead. Then, pausing on the crest, swept f i,n ;; 1 lii" 158 MAMELONS. to its rocks by rasping winds, the sunset at her back, the gloom before, she said : " Here will we bivouac. The sky is dewless, and the air is cool. The trail from this runs easy down. I would start with sunrise on my face toward Mamelons." So was it done, and they made camp be- neath the trees, a short walk from the ridge, where the great spruce stood thickly, and a spring boiled upward through the gravel, cold as ice. The evening passed like a sweet song through dewy air. She was so full of health, so richly gifted, so happy in her heart, so nigh to wedded life with him she worshipped, that her soul was full of joyousness, as the lark's throat, soaring skyward, is of song. She chattered like a magpie in many tongues, MA MELONS. 159 translating rare old bits of foreign wit and ancient mirth with apt and laughable grim- aces. Her face was mobile, rounding with jollity or lengthening with woe at will. She had the light foot and the pliant limb, the superb pose, abandon, and the languishing repose of her old race, whose princesses, with velvet feet, tinkling ankles, and forms volup- tuous, lithe as snakes, danced before kings and won kingdoms with applause from those whom, by their wheeling, swaying, flashing beauty, they made wild. She danced the dances of the East, when dancing was a lan- guage and a worship, with pantomime so rare and eloquent that the pleased eye translated every motion, as the ear catches the quick speech. Then sang she the old songs of buried days, sad, wild, and sweet as love sing- I I! ■1 ' \i y ' >ni \ \ I I 60 M^l MELONS. ing at death's door to memory and to hope ; the song of joys departed and of joys to come. So passed the evening till the eastern stars, wheeling upward, stood in the zenith. Then with lingering lips she kissed her lover on the mouth, and on her couch of fragrant boughs fell fast asleep, forgetful of all things but life and love ; murmuring softly in her happy dreams, " To-morrow night," and after a little space, again, " Sweet, sweet to- morrow ! " But all the long evening through, the old tongueless chief of measureless Mistassinni sat as an Indian sits when death is coming — back straightened, face motionless, and eyes fixed on vacancy. Not till the girl lay sleep- ing on the boughs did he stir muscle. Then he rose up, and with dilating nostrils tested Af A MELONS. I6l the air, and his throat rattled. Then [)ut his ear to earth, as man to wall, listening to the voices running through the framework of the world,' cast cones upon the dying brands, and, standing in the light made by the gummy rolls, said to the Trapper in dumb show: " The dead are moving. The earth cracks beneath the leaves. The old trail is filled with warriors hurrying eastward out of death. Their spears are slanted as when men fly. * I have been often surprised at the many and strange sounds which may at limes be heard by putting the ear flat to the sod or to the bark of trees. lu'cn the sides of rocks are not dumb, but often resonant with noises — of running waters, probably — deep within. It would seem that every formation of matter had, in some degree, the characteristics of a whispering gallery, and that, were our ears only acute enough, we might hear all sounds moving in the world. I I 1^, t.^. 4t. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) ^9 .*'*^ 7j 1.0 |5r ■6 3 I.I us u 11.25 1.8 U 111.6 w / ^' Photographic Sciences Corporation 33 WIST MAIN STRUT WMSTIII,-..Y. U5M (716) ■72-4903 ^ .