, what lies beyond that sea?"

The medicine man shook his head without speaking.

"My grandmother says 'Nothing,'" pursued Nashola, "but I know that
cannot be. Is it one of the things that I must not ask and that you
may not tell me because you are a sorcerer and I am only a boy?"

Secotan was silent so long that Nashola thought he did not mean to
reply at all. Even when he spoke it did not seem to be an answer.

"Do you see those seven stars?" he said, "that are rising from the sea
and that march so close together that you keep thinking they are going
to melt into one?"

"Yes," answered the boy. "I often lie before our lodge door and watch
them go up the sky. There are bigger stars all about them, but somehow
I love those the best, they are so small and bright and seem to look
down on us with such friendly eyes."

"It is told among the medicine men," Secotan went on slowly, "that
many, many moons ago, long before this oak tree grew upon this hill,
before its father's father had yet been planted as an acorn, our
people came hither across just such a sea as that. Far to the westward
it lay, and they came, a mere handful of bold spirits in their canoes,
across a wide water from some land that we have utterly forgotten.
Some settled down at once upon the shores of the waters they had
crossed, but some pressed eastward, little by little, as the
generations passed. They filled the land with their children and in
the end they came to another sea and went no farther. But the men who
had led them were of a different heart than ours; there were always
some who were not content to hunt and fish and move only as the deer
move or as the seasons change. They wished to press on, ever on, to
let nothing stop the progress of their march. It is said that when
they came to this sea there were seven brothers who, when their people
would no longer follow, launched their canoes and set off once more to
the eastward, and never came back.

"They dwell there in the sky, we think, and they shine through those
months of autumn that are dearest of all the year to our people, when
the days are warm and golden before the winter, when the woods are
bare and hunting is easy, when the game is fat from the summer grazing
and our yellow corn is ripe. They come back to us in the Hunter's Moon
and they watch over us all through the cold winter. We call them the
Seven Brothers of the Sun."

Nashola was silent, waiting, for he knew from his friend'