current, and listening to her charming songs in which his own name was
mentioned with so much love. And, when fatigued by her labour she
guided her bark to the shore, Ohguesse was sure to meet her with
outstretched arms, and assist her in the labour of carrying the canoe
to its shed of pine branches. In the long evenings of the moons of
snow and frost she would sit and relate to him--for her memory had not
left her--tales of the goodness of the Great Spirit and the wickedness
of the Evil Spirit; of the wars of the tribe, and of the journeys she
had made to the land of souls, and of the dreams she dreamed, and of
strange fishes she had seen in the depths of the sea, and strange
fowls in the upper regions of the air, and strange beasts in the wild
forests. Many indeed were the wonderful things she had beheld, if you
believed what she said--and who could do otherwise, since her soul had
travelled to the Happy Hunting-Grounds, and her eyes beheld with a
double nature--the nature of a spirit and the nature of a mortal? It
was in one of these long and stormy winter nights that she related to
the tribe the story of the _Maqua that married a Rattlesnake_.

There was once upon a time, she began, in the tribe of the Maquas, the
foes of my nation, a young warrior whose name was Cayenguirago. He was
the bravest and most fearless of men--his deeds were the theme of
every tongue, from the stormy shores of the wild Abenakis to the
mountain clime of the fierce Naudowessies. While he was yet a boy his
deeds were the deeds of a man--ere the suns of fifteen summers had
beamed on his head, he had followed in the war-path of the full-grown
Braves to the haunts of the Mohicans on the borders of the Great Salt
Lake. And, before the snows of the succeeding winter had melted, he
had become a Brave and a werowance[A]. But with his great strength and
daring valour was mixed a bad and cruel disposition--his heart was
very wicked and impious. When the priests spoke to him of the Great
Spirit, he told them he should never believe there was such a spirit
till he saw him--he omitted no opportunity of making scoff of that
good being, and laughing at his thunders. His mocks of those wise and
good men, the priests and prophets, whom the Great Spirit loves and
honours, by making them acquainted with his wishes and will, were
continually poured out. He paid no respect to aged people; he took
the bison's meat from his father's famished mouth, and knocked th