" When the meaning of this message came upon her the woman
fainted, but on recovering speech she despatched her nephew to the hut of
the aged chief and passed that night in prayer.

The young man set off at sunset, and by hard riding, over dim trails,
with only stars for light, he came in the gray of dawn to an upright
timber, colored red and hung with scalps, that had been cut from white
men's heads at the massacre of Wyoming. The place they still call Painted
Post. Without drawing rein he sped along the hills that hem Lake Seneca,
then, striking deeper into the wilds, he reached a smaller lake, and
almost fell from his saddle before a rude tent near the shore. A new
grave had been dug close by, and he shuddered to think that perhaps he
had come too late, but a wrinkled Indian stepped forth at that moment and
waited his word.

"I come," cried the youth,--"to see the berry that springs from snow."

"You come in time," answered Skenandoh. "No, 'tis not in that grave. It
is my own child that is buried there. She was as a sister to the one you
seek, and she bade me restore the Drop Star to her mother,--the squaw
that we know as the New Moon's Light."

Stepping into the wigwam, he emerged again, clasping the wrist of a girl
of eighteen, whose robe he tore asunder at the throat, showing the white
breast, and on it a red birth-mark; then, leading her to the young man,
he said,--"And now I must go to the setting sun." He slung a pouch about
him, loaded, not with arms and food, but stones, stepped into his canoe,
and paddled out upon the water, singing as he went a melancholy
chant--his deathsong. On gaining the middle of the lake he swung his
tomahawk and clove the bottom of the frail boat, so that it filled in a
moment and the chief sank from sight. The young man took his cousin to
her overjoyed mother, helped to win her back to the ways of civilized
life, and eventually married her. She took her Christian name again, but
left to the lake on whose banks she had lived so long her Indian name of
Drop Star--Kayutah.

THE PROPHET OF PALMYRA

It was at Palmyra, New York, that the principles of Mormonism were first
enunciated by Joseph Smith, who claimed to have found the golden plates
of the Book of Mormon in a hill-side in neighboring Manchester,--the
"Hill of Cumorah,"--to which he was led by angels. The plates were
written in characters similar to the masonic cabala, and he translated
them by divine aid, giving to t