s, when old Nokomis said to Minnehaha:
"Let us gather the harvest and strip the ripe ears of all their husks
and tassels," and Minnehaha and Nokomis went through the village,
calling on the women and the maidens and the young men to come forth and
help them with the husking of the corn. All together they went to the
cornfields, and the old men and the warriors sat in the shade at the
edges of the forest and smoked and looked on in approval, while the
young men and maidens stripped the ears of corn and laughed and sang
merrily over their labor. Whenever a youth or a maiden found a crooked
ear, they all laughed even louder, and crept about the cornfields like
weak old men bent almost double with age. But when some lucky maiden
found a blood-red ear in the husking, they all cried out: "Ah, Nushka!
You shall have a sweetheart!" And the old men nodded in approval as they
smoked beneath the pine-trees.

XIV

PICTURE-WRITING

IN those days, the Indians had no way of writing down what they thought,
and could only tell each other their messages and their dreams and
wisdom, by spoken words. The deeds of hunters and the thoughts of wise
men were remembered for a little while, but soon were talked about less
often, and when the old men died there were none left who could tell
about what had happened in the past. The grave-posts had no marks on
them, nor were the Indians able to tell who were buried in the graves.
All they knew was that some one of their own tribe, some former wise man
or hunter, or some beautiful maiden of other days lay buried there. And
Hiawatha was much troubled that the Indians did not know the graves of
their own fathers, and could not tell the men who should come after
them about the wonderful things that had taken place long before they
were born.

Hiawatha spent many days alone in the deep forest, trying to invent some
way by which the Indians could always know what had happened in the
past, and thereby tell secrets to each other and send messages without
the risk of having them forgotten by the messenger. And after a great
deal of thought, Hiawatha discovered one of the finest things in all the
wide world--a secret that has changed the lives of all Indians since his
time.

He took his different colored paints, and began to draw strange figures
on the bark of the birch-tree, and every figure had some meaning that
the red men would always remember. For the great Manito, God of all the
Indians,