“Fortunately, yes, for I cannot swim,” I told him.

He laughed, replying, “Well, it is not so bad as when the Great Deep Waters covered the world.”

Immediately I foresaw the coming legend, so crept into the shell of monosyllables.

“No?” I questioned.

“No,” he replied.  “For, one time, there was no land here at all; everywhere there was just water.”

“I can quite believe it,” I remarked caustically.

He laughed—­that irresistible, though silent, David Warfield laugh of his that always brought a responsive smile from his listeners.  Then he plunged directly into the tradition, with no preface save a comprehensive sweep of his wonderful hands towards my wide window, against which the rains were beating.

“It was after a long, long time of this—­this rain.  The mountain streams were swollen, the rivers choked, the sea began to rise—­and yet it rained; for weeks and weeks it rained.”  He ceased speaking, while the shadows of centuries gone crept into his eyes.  Tales of the misty past always inspired him.

“Yes,” he continued.  “It rained for weeks and weeks, while the mountain torrents roared thunderingly down, and the sea crept silently up.  The level lands were first to float in sea-water, then to disappear.  The slopes were next to slip into the sea.  The world was slowly being flooded.  Hurriedly the Indian tribes gathered in one spot, a place of safety far above the reach of the on-creeping sea.  The spot was the circling shore of Lake Beautiful, up the North Arm.  They held a Great Council and decided at once upon a plan of action.  A giant canoe should be built, and some means contrived to anchor it in case the waters mounted to the heights.  The men undertook the canoe, the women the anchorage.

“A giant tree was felled, and day and night the men toiled over its construction into the most stupendous canoe the world has ever known.  Not an hour, not a moment, but many worked, while the toil-wearied ones slept, only to awake to renewed toil.  Meanwhile, the women also worked at a cable—­the largest, the longest, the strongest that Indian hands and teeth had ever made.  Scores of them gathered and prepared the cedar-fibre; scores of them plaited, rolled, and seasoned it; scores of them chewed upon it inch by inch to make it pliable; scores of them oiled and worked, oiled and worked, oiled and worked it into a sea-resisting fabric.  And still the sea crept up, and up, and up.  It was the last day; hope of life for the tribes, of land for the world, was doomed.  Strong hands, self-sacrificing hands, fastened the cable the women had made—­one end to the giant canoe, the other about an enormous boulder, a vast immovable rock as firm as the foundations of the world—­for might not the canoe, with its priceless freight drift out, far out, to sea, and when the water subsided might not this ship of safety be leagues and leagues beyond the sight of land on the storm-driven Pacific?