d, but I had to hear from the lip of a Squamish
Indian chief the only treatise on the nobility of "clean fatherhood"
that I have yet unearthed. And this treatise has been an Indian
legend for centuries; and, lest they forget how all-important those
two little words must ever be, Siwash Rock stands to remind them,
set there by the Deity as a monument to one who kept his own life
clean, that cleanliness might be the heritage of the generations
to come.

It was "thousands of years ago" (all Indian legends begin in
extremely remote times) that a handsome boy chief journeyed in his
canoe to the upper coast for the shy little northern girl whom he
brought home as his wife. Boy though he was, the young chief had
proved himself to be an excellent warrior, a fearless hunter, and an
upright, courageous man among men. His tribe loved him, his enemies
respected him, and the base and mean and cowardly feared him.

The customs and traditions of his ancestors were a positive religion
to him, the sayings and the advices of the old people were his
creed. He was conservative in every rite and ritual of his race.
He fought his tribal enemies like the savage that he was. He sang
his war-songs, danced his war-dances, slew his foes, but the little
girl-wife from the north he treated with the deference that he gave
his own mother, for was she not to be the mother of his warrior son?

The year rolled round, weeks merged into months, winter into spring,
and one glorious summer at daybreak he wakened to her voice calling
him. She stood beside him, smiling.

"It will be to-day," she said proudly.

He sprang from his couch of wolf-skins and looked out upon the
coming day: the promise of what it would bring him seemed breathing
through all his forest world. He took her very gently by the hand
and led her through the tangle of wilderness down to the water's
edge, where the beauty spot we moderns call Stanley Park bends
about Prospect Point. "I must swim," he told her.

"I must swim, too," she smiled, with the perfect understanding of
two beings who are mated. For, to them, the old Indian custom was
law--the custom that the parents of a coming child must swim until
their flesh is so clear and clean that a wild animal cannot scent
their proximity. If the wild creatures of the forests have no fear
of them, then, and only then, are they fit to become parents, and
to scent a human is in itself a fearsome thing to all wild creatures.

S