blue as
the azure shells; hair flashing out golden gleams, like that of
Pyrrha, when she braided hers so featly for the coming of some
ambrosial boy.

"I must marry you, Marance," said I, jocularly, to the damsel, as I
jumped her out of the canoe,--"I shall marry you when we get back."

It is good to live in a marsh. No fast boarding-house women there,
lurking for the unwary; no breaches of promise; "no nothing" in the
old-man-trap line. Abjure fast boarding-houses, you silly old
bachelors, and go to grass in a marsh!

Marance laughed merrily, as she tripped away; then, turning, she
said,--

"But what if I never get back? I may lose myself in these lonely
places, and never be heard of again."

"Oh, in that case," replied I, hard driven for a compliment, "in that
case, I must wait until Gilette"--a younger sister--"grows up. She
will be exactly like you: I must only wait for Gilette."

"You remind me of Pete Walker," said the old man, as we shot away up
the channel, our canoe ripping up the matted surface like the cue of a
novice, when he runs a fatal reef along the sere and yellow cloth of
some billiard-table erewhile in verdure clad. "You are as bad as Pete
Walker, who thought one sister must be as good as another, because
they looked so much alike."

And then, as we loitered about in the bays, the old man told me the
story of Walker's honeymoon, which was a sad and a short one. This is
the story.

Near that wild rapid of the Columbia River known as the "Dalles,"
there was, years ago, a Jesuit mission, established in a small fort,
built, like that at Nez-Perces, of mud. The labors of the holy men
composing the mission involved no inconsiderable amount of danger,
devoted as they were to the hopeless task of reforming such sinners as
the Sioux, the Blackfeet, the Gros-Ventres, the Flat-Heads, the
Assiniboines, the Nez-Perces, and a few other such.

Some of these missionaries had sojourned for a long time with a branch
of the Blackfoot tribe, among whom they found two young white girls,
remarkable for their exact resemblance to each other, and therefore
supposed to be twins. I say _supposed_, because of their origin there
was no trace. All that was known about them was, that they were the
sole survivors of a train of emigrants, attacked and murdered by the
Nez-Perces, who, actuated by one of those whims characteristic of the
red men, spared the lives of the two children, and adopted them into
the tribe. Subse