g face and black-robed figure, and the feel of the
clinging hands of a tiny fatherless boy! His eyes did not see the homely
street at his feet--the dying rockets and fireworks glaring against the
sky. He saw only a simple grave in the open veldt in far-away Africa--a
grave that he, himself, had heaped with stones formed in the one word
"Canada." At the recollection of it, poor Billy buried his aching head
in his hands. The glory had paled and vanished. There was nothing left
of this terrible war but the misery, the mourning, the heartbreak of
it all!

The Brotherhood

"What is the silver chain for, Queetah?" asked the boy, lifting the
tomahawk* and running the curious links between his thumb and fingers.
"I never saw one before."

[*The tomahawk and avenging knife spoken of in the story are both
in the possession of the writer, the knife having been buried for
seventy-three years on the estate where she was born.]

The Mohawk smiled. "That is because few tomahawks content themselves
with times of peace. While war lives, you will never see a silver chain
worn by an Iroquois, nor will you see it on anything he possesses," he
answered.

"Then it is the badge of peace?" questioned the boy.

"The badge of peace--yes," replied Queetah.

It was a unique weapon which the boy fingered so curiously. The tomahawk
itself was shaped like a slender axe, and wrought of beaten copper, with
a half-inch edge of gleaming steel cleverly welded on, forming a deadly
blade. At the butt end of the axe was a delicately shaped pipe bowl,
carved and chased with heads of animals, coiling serpents and odd
conventional figures, totems of the once mighty owner, whose war cry
had echoed through the lake lands and forests more than a century ago.
The handle was but eighteen inches long, a smooth polished stem of
curled maple, the beauty of the natural wood heightened by a dark strip
of color that wound with measured, even sweeps from tip to base like
a ribbon. Queetah had long ago told the boy how that rich spiral
decoration was made--how the old Indians wound the wood with strips of
wet buckskin, then burnt the exposed wood sufficiently to color it. The
beautiful white coils were the portions protected by the hide from the
flame and smoke.

Inlaid in this handle were strange designs of dull-beaten silver, cubes
and circles and innumerable hearts, the national symbol of the Mohawks.
At the extreme end was a small, flat metal mouthpiec