witzer before they can receive it. My father
and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of
armed neutrality so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was
broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that
the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict
impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking,
and I did the suffering. As a general thing I was a backward, cautious,
unadventurous boy; but I once jumped off a two-story table; another time
I gave an elephant a "plug" of tobacco and retired without waiting for
an answer; and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep,
and got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in the
hearing of my father. Let us not pry into the result; it was of no
consequence to any one but me.

But the poem I have referred to as attracting my father's attention and
achieving his favour was "Hiawatha." Some man who courted a sudden and
awful death presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in
my own senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold
blood--saw him open the book, and heard him read these following lines,
with the same inflectionless judicial frigidity with which he always
read his charge to the jury, or administered an oath to a witness:

"Take your bow,
O Hiawatha,
Take your arrows, jasper-headed,
Take your war-club, Puggawaugun,
And your mittens, Minjekahwan,
And your birch canoe for sailing,
And the oil of Mishe-Nama."

Presently my father took out of his breast pocket an imposing "Warranty
Deed," and fixed his eyes upon it and dropped into meditation. I knew
what it was. A Texan lady and gentleman had given my half-brother, Orrin
Johnson, a handsome property in a town in the North, in gratitude to him
for having saved their lives by an act of brilliant heroism.

By and by my father looked towards me and sighed. Then he said:

"If I had such a son as this poet, here were a subject worthier than the
traditions of these Indians."

"If you please, sir, where?"

"In this deed."

"Yes--in this very deed," said my father, throwing it on the table.
"There is more poetry, more romance, more sublimity, more splendid
imagery hidden away in that homely document than could be found in all
the traditions