“A white man was near; his cabin lay just below; he had climbed a tree above Waubeeneemah and remained a silent witness of this wordy war, until, looking up the river, he saw a canoe that had broken from its fastenings and was rushing down to the rapids below.  It contained the families of the two warriors, who were helplessly striving against the swift flow of waters.

“The white man spoke, and the warriors listened.  He cried, ’Look to your canoe! and see Skylight!’

“Through the pines rushed Wabausee, and down the river-bank Waubeeneemah, and into the tide, until they met the coming canoe, across whose birchen bow they gave the grasp of peace, and ever since that time Indian and white man have called this place Skylight.”

“Where are the Indians now?” I could not help asking,—­and yet with no purpose, beyond expression of the thought question.

The shadows were gathering, the eyelids of the day were closing.  Saul caught me up again through the shadows into those eyes of his, and answered,—­

“Here, Lucy!  I am a pale form of Waubeeneemah!  I know it!  I feel it now!  I sometimes ache for foemen and the wilds.”

Why do I think of that time to-night on the Big Blue, far away from Skylight, and imagine that the prairie airs are ringing with the echoes of the great cries that are heard in my native land, “I see North!” and “I see South!” and there is no white man of them all high enough to see the United States?

I’ve wandered!  Let me think,—­yes, I have it!  My thought began with trying to fancy Saul’s mother taking him to baptism.

She was dead, when I went to Skylight, her son’s wife.

She went into the higher life at thirty-three of the threescore-and-ten cycle of the human period.  How young to die!

The longer we live, the stronger grows the wish to live.  And why not?  When the circle is almost ended, and all the momentum of threescore-and-ten is gained, why not pass the line and enter into second childhood?  What more beautiful truth in Nature’s I Am, than obedience to this law?

I’ve another fancy on the Big Blue to-night.  It is a place for fancies.  I remember—­a long time ago it seems, and yet I am not so old as Saul’s mother—­the first knowledge that I had of life.  I saw the sun come up one morning out of the sea, and with it there came out of the night of my past a consciousness.  I was a soul, and held relations separate from other souls to that risen sun and that sea.  From that hour I grew into life.  A growth from the Unseen came to me with every day, born I knew not how into my soul.  I sent out nothing to people the future.  All came to me.

Is this true, this faith or fancy that God sends a tidal wave through man, bringing with it from Heaven’s ocean fragments set afloat from its shore to lodge in our lives, until there comes an ebb, and then begin our hopes and desires all to tend heavenward, or elsewhere? Have you never felt, do you not now feel, that there is more of yourself somewhere else than there is upon the Earth?