d royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many generations.
The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons
of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children
of the ancient race. The warrior's bow lay beside him with rotting
string; the child's playthings were still clasped in fleshless
fingers; beside the squaw's skull the ear-pendants of _hiagua_ shells
lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh years before.

Near the door, and where the slanting moonbeams fell full upon it, was
the last who had been borne to the death hut, the mother of Wallulah.
Six years before Multnomah had brought her body,--brought it alone,
with no eye to behold his grief; and since then no human tread had
disturbed the royal burial-place.

He came now and looked down upon the body. It had been tightly
swathed, fold upon fold, in some oriental fabric; and the wrappings,
stiffened by time still showed what had once been a rare symmetry of
form. The face was covered with a linen cloth, yellow now through age
and fitting like a mask to the features. The chief knelt down and drew
away the face-cloth. The countenance, though shrunken, was almost
perfectly preserved. Indeed, so well preserved were many of the
corpses the first white settlers found on these _mimaluse_ islands as
to cause at one time a belief that the Indians had some secret process
of embalming their dead. There was no such process, however,--nothing
save the antiseptic properties of the ocean breeze which daily fanned
the burial islands of the lower Columbia.

Lovely indeed must the mother of Wallulah have been in her life.
Withered as her features were, there was a delicate beauty in them
still,--in the graceful brow, the regular profile, the exquisitely
chiselled chin. Around the shoulders and the small shapely head her
hair had grown in rich luxuriant masses.

The chief gazed long on the shrunken yet beautiful face. His iron
features grew soft, as none but Wallulah had ever seen them grow. He
touched gently the hair of his dead wife, and put it back from her
brow with a wistful, caressing tenderness. He had never understood
her; she had always been a mystery to him; the harsh savagery of his
nature had never been able to enter into or comprehend the refined
grace of hers; but he had loved her with all the fierce, tenacious,
secretive power of his being, a power that neither time nor death
could change. Now he spoke to her, his