chat with Lucilla. The fact
was that the captain had had a bit of private talk with his wife and her
mother, in which he gave them an inkling into the state of affairs as
concerned the two young men and his eldest daughter, and requested their
assistance in preventing either one from so far monopolizing the young
girl as to be tempted into letting her into the secret of his feelings
toward her.

They reached Pleasant Plains early in the evening, landed the cousins
belonging there, with the single exception of Miss Annis Keith, then
turned immediately and went down the river again, reaching the lake about
the usual time for retiring to their berths.

The rest of their voyage was as delightful as that of the first day had
been, and spent in a similar manner. As they sat together on the deck,
toward evening, Grace asked her father if Mackinaw had not been the scene
of something interesting in history.

"There was a dreadful massacre there many years ago," he replied; "it was
in 1763, by the Indians under Pontiac, an Indian chief. It was at the time
of his attack on Detroit. There is a cave shown on the island in which the
whites took refuge, but the Indians kindled a fire at its mouth and smoked
them--men, women, and children--to death."

"Oh, how dreadful, papa! how very dreadful!" she exclaimed.

"Yes," he said, "those were dreadful times; but often the poor Indians
were really less to blame than the whites, who urged them on--the French
against the English and the English against the Americans.

"Pontiac was the son of an Ojibway woman, and chief of that tribe, also of
the Ottawas and the Pottawattamies, who were in alliance with the
Ojibways. In 1746 he and his warriors defended the French at Detroit
against an attack by some of the northern tribes, and in 1755 he took part
in their fight with Braddock, acting as the leader of the Ottawas."

"I wonder," said Grace, as her father paused for a moment in his
narrative, "if he was the Indian who, in that fight, aimed so many times
at Washington, yet failed to hit him, and at last gave up the attempt to
kill him, concluding that he must be under the special protection of the
Great Spirit."

"That I cannot tell," her father said. "But whoever that Indian may have
been I think he was right in his conclusion--that God protected and
preserved our Washington that he might play the important part he did in
securing his country's freedom.

"But to return to my story. Pon