large tamarack tree, which was hollow, and lived there comfortably until
a party of hunters discovered their retreat. The she-bear told Muckwa to
remain quietly in the tree, and that she would decoy off the hunters.
She came out of the hollow, jumped from a bough of the tree, and escaped
unharmed, although the hunters shot after her. Some time after, she
returned to the tree, and told Muckwa that he had better go back to his
own people. "Since you have lived among us," said she, "we have nothing
but ill-fortune; you have killed my sister; and now your friends have
followed your footsteps to our retreats to kill us. The Indian and the
bear cannot live in the same lodge, for the Master of Life has appointed
for them different habitations." So Muckwa returned with his son to his
own people; but he never after would shoot a she-bear, for fear that he
should kill his wife."

I admire this story for the _savoir faire_, the nonchalance, the Vivian
Greyism of Indian life. It is also a poetical expression of the sorrows
of unequal relations; those in which the Master of Life was not
consulted. Is it not pathetic; the picture of the mother carrying off
the child that was like herself into the deep, cool caves, while the
other, shivering with cold, cried after her in vain? The moral, too, of
Muckwa's return to the bear lodges, thinking to hide his sin by silence,
while it was at once discerned by those connected with him, is fine.

We have a nursery tale, of which children never weary, of a little boy
visiting a bear house and holding intercourse with them on terms as free
as Muckwa did. So, perhaps, the child of Norman-Saxon blood, no less
than the Indian, finds some pulse of the Orson in his veins.

As they loved to draw the lower forms of nature up to them, divining
their histories, and imitating their ways, in their wild dances and
paintings; even so did they love to look upward and people the
atmosphere that enfolds the earth, with fairies and manitoes. The
sister, obliged to leave her brother on the earth, bids him look up at
evening, and he will see her painting her face in the west.

All places, distinguished in any way by nature, aroused the feelings of
worship, which, however ignorant, are always elevating. See as instances
in this kind, the stories of Nanabojou, and the Winnebago Prince, at the
falls of St. Anthony.

As with the Greeks, beautiful legends grow up which express the aspects
of various localities. Fro