ians gather
their first green corn, when, as the chief lay sleeping on his bed of
skins, with the mother of his youngest child on his arm, he saw
strange things in his slumbers. He dreamed that the bands of the Lenni
Lenapes had taken the bones of their fathers from the burying places
of the nation, loaded their women with pemmican and dried corn, folded
up their tents, and departed towards the regions of their great
father, the sun. He saw mountains, whose summits breathed fire, and
others, which were the abode of the snow spirit--now noisy with the
war of the Holy People above the clouds, and now with the hissing of
the Great Serpent in the deep, awful, and inaccessible valleys of the
bright old inhabitants.[A] They overcame, he thought, the impediments
of fire and storm; they charmed away the wrath of the evil spirits,
and looked at length from the eastern ridge of those mighty hills upon
the interminable glades and prairies spread out in their shade. Onward
they went, he thought, till at length they saw rolling before them a
mighty river, upon whose banks abode a nation of warriors, whose size
was much greater than that of the Lenape, and who dwelt behind hills
of their own making, whence they would make incursions into the
territories of the neighbouring tribes. Before him stood one of the
maidens of the land. She was beautiful as a straight tree, as a meadow
of flowers, as a tree covered with blossoms, as a clear sky lit up
with stars. Her voice was sweeter than the notes of the
Mocking-Bird[B], and her eye brighter and softer than the eye of the
mountain-goat. She wore a cloak made of the tender bark of the
mulberry-tree, interlaced with the white feathers of the swan, and the
gay plumage of the snake-bird, and the painted vulture. Strings of
shells depended from her ancles, and flowers were braided into her
hair. When she spoke to the young Lenape, it was with a soft voice, as
if it would assure him, that the heart which dwelt within was as
gentle as that voice, and as mild as that eye. He thought he wooed
that maiden to be his wife, but, when she would have become such, and
he would have pressed to his bosom the lovely flower of the giant
people, there only appeared a little white dove which flew away, and
nestled in the branches of the great medicine trees[C].

[Footnote A: See the tradition, entitled "The Valley of the Bright Old
Inhabitants."]

[Footnote B: When an Indian wishes to express his admiration o