is suggestion, and be eager to
start for the woods near Katahdin soon after they got their eyes open.

He had been doing his work with a candle held in his brown fingers; but
as dawn-light began to enter the cabin, he quenched its dingy, yellow
flicker, opened the camp-door, and surveyed the morning sky.

"It'll be a good day to start out, I guess," he muttered. "Let's see,
what time is it?"

The stars had not yet paled, and Herb forthwith fell to studying them;
for they were his jewelled time-piece, by which he could tell the hour
so long as they shone. Watch he had none.

While he gazed aloft at the glinting specks, he unconsciously began to
croon, in a powerful bass voice, with deep gutturals, some words which
certainly weren't woodsman's English.

"_N'loan pes-saus, mok glint ont-aven,
Glint ont-aven, nosh morgan_."

"What on earth is that outlandish thing you're singing, Herb?" roared
Neal Farrar from the bunk, awakened by the sounds. "Give us that stave
again--do!"

The guide started. He had scarcely been aware of what he was humming,
and his laugh was a trifle disconcerted.

"So you're waking up, are ye?" he said. "Tain't time to be stirring yet;
I ought to be kicked for making such a row."

"But what's that you were singing?" reiterated Neal. "The words weren't
English, and they had a fine sort of roll."

"They're Injun," was the answer. "I guess 'twas all the talking I done
last night that brung 'em into my head. I picked 'em up from that fellow
I was telling you about. He'd start crooning 'em whenever he looked at
the stars to find out the hour."

"Are they about the stars?"

"I guess so. A city man, who had studied the redskins' language a lot,
told me they meant:--

'We are the stars which sing,
We sing with our light.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Leland's translation.]

Then Herb chanted the two lines again in the original tongue.

"There was quite a lot more," he said; "but I can't remember it. I
learned some queer jargon from Chris, and how to make most of the signs
belonging to the Indian sign-talk. The fellow had more of his mother
than his father in him. I guess I'd better give over jabbering, and cook
our breakfast."

It was evident that Herb did not want to dwell upon his reminiscences.
And Neal had tact enough to swallow his burning curiosity about all
things Indian. He asked no more questions, but rolled off the
fir-boughs, and dressed himself.

Cyrus and Dol sprang up to