e only property. Worse than this, the outskirts of the clearing
were sometimes haunted by blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she
had mysterious confidences. Mr. Walker more than once regretted his
indiscreet humanity; but she presently relieved him of responsibility,
and possibly of bloodguiltiness, by disappearing entirely.

When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent village of Logport, in
the capacity of housemaid to a trader's wife, who, joining some little
culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to instruct her
charge. But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil to even so
liberal a teacher. She accepted the alphabet with great good-humor,
but always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in which all interest
expired at the completion of each lesson. She found a thousand uses
for her books and writing materials other than those known to civilized
children. She made a curious necklace of bits of slate-pencil, she
constructed a miniature canoe from the pasteboard covers of her primer,
she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed the faces of her
younger companions with blue ink. Religious instruction she received as
good-humoredly, and learned to pronounce the name of the Deity with
a cheerful familiarity that shocked her preceptress. Nor could her
reverence be reached through analogy; she knew nothing of the Great
Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of the Happy Hunting-Grounds.
Yet she attended divine service regularly, and as regularly asked for a
hymn-book; and it was only through the discovery that she had collected
twenty-five of these volumes and had hidden them behind the woodpile,
that her connection with the First Baptist Church of Logport ceased. She
would occasionally abandon these civilized and Christian privileges, and
disappear from her home, returning after several days of absence with an
odor of bark and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in the shape
of venison or game.

To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen, and, according to the laws
of her race, a woman. I do not think the most romantic fancy would have
called her pretty. Her complexion defied most of those ambiguous similes
through which poets unconsciously apologize for any deviation from the
Caucasian standard. It was not wine nor amber colored; if anything, it
was smoky. Her face was tattooed with red and white lines on one cheek,
as if a duo-toothed comb had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but
f