I remember
being tormented by it, when a boy, but never knew by what right. Let me
translate for you this Indian register of--let me see--my grandmother's
marriage. 'Ten moons from the lost moon, and many sleeps from the life
of the big Huron Water, the Great Spirit called Luella to walk with a
son of the Pale-Faces. The mystery [the priest] met them, and told them
to go on to the Sun. They are gone in the path of the lost moons.'"
"Let us go to Skylight by the way of Montreal," I suggested.
Saul said, "It is well."
At the Missouri I laid aside my prairie costume, and assumed the raiment
of fashion.
We found in Canada pleasant people bearing our name, and they welcomed
us as relatives.
Richard Monten lay beside a fixed cloud of marble; and although Luella's
sister had said she died far away, yet her name was beneath her
husband's.
Tradition told us of the beautiful Indian wife with eyes like
light,--and how her husband took her, every year, alone with him into
the wilds,--and how, when they came back, and the winter snows fell,
she would sit all day beside him, with her eyes on figures and letters,
whilst her impatient fingers were threading her long hair, and memory
shook her head at the attempted education, perhaps wisely and well.
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