owerful
and well-disposed to his charge, or weak, and undertakes his task of
protection with reluctance.

The Little White Bear of the Iroquois was reposing by night in his
cabin, on the banks of his own pleasant river, in the month of ripe
berries, when he beheld, by the light of the moon, a forest-chief in
all his pride enter the lodge. The step of the stranger was noiseless
as the fall of snow, and of word or sound uttered he none. The chief
of the Tuscaroras arose, and took down his sinewy bow, and drew from
his quiver a sharp and barbed arrow--the figure faded away like a
morning mist before the beams of the sun, and was gone from his eyes.
Tetontuaga woke his comrades, who lay scattered about in careless
slumber--nothing had they seen, heard, or dreamed of. He lay down
again, and, drawing his buffalo cloak closely around him, tried to
close his eyes and ears, in oblivion of things, and to rein his fancy
to look upon other shapes than those of air.

No sooner had he composed his limbs, and invoked the beneficent spirit
who presides over sleep to grant him a slumber unvisited by hideous
or frowning forms, than the shadowy warrior again arose and stood at
his side. The Iroquois had now full opportunity to scan his form and
features. Of gigantic frame he seemed, and his dress was of a texture
and fashion such as the chief had never seen before--of an age and a
nation none might guess. He was a half taller than the tallest man of
the Five Nations, who are reputed the tallest of all the red men of
the land, and his limbs, arms, legs, hands, feet, were of twice the
ordinary size of an Iroquois warrior. His coal-black eyes were larger
than the buffalo's, but they were lustreless as those of the dead; his
teeth, large and of the colour of bones bleached by the sun and rain,
chattered like the teeth of a man overpowered by the cold of the
Bear-Moon. He wore over his shoulders a long robe of curiously dyed,
or painted cloth, fastened at the throat by a piece of shining metal,
and a fur cap made of the skin of an animal never seen by the
Iroquois, above which rose a high plume of feathers of a bird unknown
in Indian lands. The mocassins were of one piece, reaching with no
visible seam to the knees, and he wore upon his sinewy thighs garments
shaped like those worn by the white stranger. His language, when he
spoke, was a strange and uncouth language, yet it was understood by
the Iroquois warrior, who felt, as he heard the s