“’Tis a magic stone, sweetheart.  Keep it in the sunshine on thy window-ledge, and when summer is over ’t will be white as snow.  Leave it in a snowbank, or in a cellar under wet moss, and ’t will turn again to rose-color.  This I have seen.  In the winter nights the Frost King hangs his ice-diamonds on every twig and rope and eave, and when they shine in the red sunrise they look like these crystals.  And I have seen all the sky from the zenith to the horizon at midnight full of leaping rose-red flames above such a world of ice.  ’Tis very beautiful there, Reine Margot, and fit kingdom for a fairy queen.”

Marguerite turned the strange quartz rock about in her small hands with something like awe.

“And the shoes are shoes of silence, for an Indian can go and come in them so softly that even a rabbit does not hear.  They were made by a kind old squaw who would take no pay, and a young warrior gave me the wampum belt, and I found the stone one day while I was hunting in the forest, so that all three of thy gifts are really gifts from Norumbega.”

“I think—­I’m rather glad it is not a real city,” said Margot with a long breath.  “It is more like fairyland, just as it is,—­and the Frost King and the terrible sickness are the two ogres, and the good medicine man is a white wizard.  It is a very beautiful kingdom, Alain, and I think you are the Prince in disguise!”

NOTES

[1] Kanonghsionni was the name which the Iroquois gave themselves.  It appears that at this time they occupied the country along the St. Lawrence held some centuries before by the Ojibways and later, in the time of Champlain, by the Hurons.

[2] Hiawatha is generally said to have founded the league of the Five Nations.  Although these nations were united against any attack from outside they were not always free from interior enmities and dissensions, and the Mohawks in particular were objects of the fear and dislike of their neighbors, as the significance of their sobriquet clearly shows.

[3] Aneda is said to be the Iroquois word for spruce.  When Champlain’s men were attacked by scurvy in the same neighborhood half a century later, the Iroquois no longer lived there, and this remedy was not suggested.

[4] Rose quartz has this property.

THE MUSTANGS

    Bred to the Game of the World as the Kings and the Emperors played it,
      Fate and our masters hurled us over the terrible sea. 
    When the sails of the carracks were furled the Game was the Game that
        we made it,—­
      We that were horses in Spain were gods in a realm to be!

    Swift at the word we sped, we fought in the front of the battle,—­
      Ah, but the wild men fled when they heard us neigh from afar! 
    The field was littered with dead, cut down like slaughtered cattle
     —­Ah, but the earth is red where the Conquistadores are!