ily, such sacred associations cluster around them of my
childhood and manhood. And the memories of the dear ones gone seem to be
woven into the very warp and woof of the stately old elm-trees that
shade its velvet lawns, and the voice of the river seems full of old
words and music, vanished tones and laughter.

"No one can know, or dream, how inexpressibly dear the old home is to my
heart. If I had to give it up," sez he, "it would be like tearin' out my
very heart-strings, and partin' with what seems like a part of my own
life."

The man looked very earnest and sincere when he said this, and even
agitated. He meant what he said, no doubt on't.

And then Krit sez, "How would you like it if you were ordered to leave
it at a day's notice--leave it forever--leave it so some one else, some
one you hated, some one who had always injured you, could enjoy it--

"Leave it so that you knew you could never live there again, never
see a sun rise or a sun set over the dear old fields, and mountains, and
river, you loved so well--

"Never have the chance to stand by the graves of your fathers, and your
children, that were a-sleepin' under the beautiful old trees that your
grandfathers had set out--

"Never see the dear old grounds they walked through, the old rooms full
of the memories of their love, their joys, and their sorrows, and your
loves, and hopes, and joys, and sadness?

"What should you do if some one strong enough, but without a shadow of
justice or reason, should order you out of it at once--force you to go?"

"I should try to kill him," sez the man promptly, before he had time to
think what to say.

"Well," sez Krit, "that is what the Injuns try to do, and the world is
horrified at it. Their homes are jest as dear to them as ours are to us;
their love for their own living and dead is jest as strong. Their grief
and sense of wrong and outrage is even stronger than the white man's
would be, for they don't have the distractions of civilized life to take
up their attention. They brood over their wrongs through long days and
nights, unsolaced by daily papers and latest telegraphic news, and their
famished, freezin' bodies addin' their terrible pangs to their soul's
distress.

"Is it any wonder that after broodin' over their wrongs through long
days and nights, half starved, half naked, their dear old homes
gone--shut up here in the rocky, hateful waste, that they must call
home, and probably their wives and daug