The girl had told her parents that she would never consent to the match.  On the evening preceding the day fixed for her marriage she dressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments.  Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove.  Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go.  When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whose inclinations they had, in the end, too violently thwarted.

THE GIRL AND THE SCALP

About the middle of the seventeenth century there lived on the shores of Lake Ontario a Wyandot girl so beautiful that she had for suitors nearly all the young men of her tribe; but while she rejected none, neither did she favor any one in particular.  To prevent her from falling to someone not in their tribe the suitors held a meeting and concluded that their claims should be withdrawn and the war chief urged to woo her.  He objected on account of the disparity of years, but was finally persuaded to make his advances.  His practice had been confined rather to the use of stone-headed arrows than love-darts, and his dexterity in the management of hearts displayed rather in making bloody incisions than tender impressions.  But after he had painted and arrayed himself as for battle and otherwise adorned his person, he paid court to her, and a few days later was accepted on condition that he would pledge his word as a warrior to do what she should ask of him.  When his pledge had been given she told him to bring her the scalp of a certain Seneca chief whom she hated.  He begged her to reflect that this chief was his bosom friend, whose confidence it would be an infamy to betray.  But she told him either to redeem his pledge or be proclaimed for a lying dog, and then left him.

Goaded into fury, the Wyandot chief blackened his face and rushed off to the Seneca village, where he tomahawked his friend and rushed out of the lodge with his scalp.  A moment later the mournful scalp-whoop of the Senecas was resounding through the village.  The Wyandot camp was attacked, and after a deadly combat of three days the Senecas triumphed, avenging the murder of their chief by the death of his assailant as well as of the miserable girl who had caused the tragedy.  The war thus begun lasted more than thirty years.

A CHIPPEWA LOVE-SONG

In 1759 great exertions were made by the French Indian Department under General Montcalm to bring a body of Indians into the valley of the lower St. Lawrence, and invitations for this purpose reached the utmost shores of Lake Superior.  In one of the canoes from that quarter, which was left on the way down at the mouth of the Utawas, was a Chippewa girl named Paigwaineoshe, or the White Eagle.  While the party awaited there the result of events at Quebec she formed an attachment for a young Algonquin belonging to a French mission.  This attachment was mutual, and gave rise to a song of which the following is a prose translation: