ting together in his son's lodge, that he considered the beaver and
the whites the wisest people on earth; indeed, he was convinced they
were the same; and an incident which had happened to him long before had
assured him of this. So he began the following story, and as the pipe
passed in turn to him, Reynal availed himself of these interruptions to
translate what had preceded. But the old man accompanied his words with
such admirable pantomime that translation was hardly necessary.

He said that when he was very young, and had never yet seen a white man,
he and three or four of his companions were out on a beaver hunt, and he
crawled into a large beaver lodge, to examine what was there. Sometimes
he was creeping on his hands and knees, sometimes he was obliged to
swim, and sometimes to lie flat on his face and drag himself along. In
this way he crawled a great distance underground. It was very dark, cold
and close, so that at last he was almost suffocated, and fell into a
swoon. When he began to recover, he could just distinguish the voices of
his companions outside, who had given him up for lost, and were singing
his death song. At first he could see nothing, but soon he discerned
something white before him, and at length plainly distinguished three
people, entirely white; one man and two women, sitting at the edge of
a black pool of water. He became alarmed and thought it high time to
retreat. Having succeeded, after great trouble, in reaching daylight
again, he went straight to the spot directly above the pool of water
where he had seen the three mysterious beings. Here he beat a hole with
his war club in the ground, and sat down to watch. In a moment the nose
of an old male beaver appeared at the opening. Mene-Seela instantly
seized him and dragged him up, when two other beavers, both females,
thrust out their heads, and these he served in the same way. "These,"
continued the old man, "must have been the three white people whom I saw
sitting at the edge of the water."

Mene-Seela was the grand depository of the legends and traditions of the
village. I succeeded, however, in getting from him only a few fragments.
Like all Indians, he was excessively superstitious, and continually saw
some reason for withholding his stories. "It is a bad thing," he would
say, "to tell the tales in summer. Stay with us till next winter, and I
will tell you everything I know; but now our war parties are going out,
and our young men wil