region toward the southeast on the banks of a tributary (the Little Tennessee) of that broad and splendid river, which was now running crimson and gold and with a steely glitter, reflecting the sunset, in the midst of the dusky, dull-blue landscape, with the languor of evening slipping down upon it.

There it lay in primeval beauty,—the land of hope. Oh, for the spirit of a soothsayer; for one prophetic moment! What did that land hold,—what days should dawn upon it; what hearthstones should be alight; who should be the victor in the conquests of the future, and what of the victim?

But they loved this country—the Cherokees; their own, they said, for the Great Spirit gave it them. They even sought to associate with those splendid eastern mountains the origin of the Cherokee people by the oft-reiterated claim that the first of their race sprung from the soil of those noble summits or dropped from the clouds that hover about the lofty domes. And now Willinawaugh broke from the silence that the lack of a common tongue had fostered, and despite that embargo on the exchange of ideas he grew fluent and his enthusiasm seemed to whet the understanding of his listeners, who could realize in some sort the language that they could not speak. They caught the names of the great landmarks. The vast range, on an outlier of which they pitched their camp, as insignificant in proportion as an atom to the universe, he called the Wasioto Mountain, and one of the rivers was the Hoho-hebee, and others were the Coot-cla, the Agiqua, the Canot, the Nonachuckeh. Hamish remembered these names long after they were forgotten by others, and the re-christened Clinch and Holston and French Broad flowed as fairly with their uncouth modern nomenclature as when they were identified by as liquid musical syllables as the lapsing of their own currents; for never did he lose the impression of this night;—never faded the mental picture of the Cherokee chief, the war-paint, vermilion and black and white, on his face as he sat before the fire, the waving of the eagle-feathers on his tufted scalp-lock blotting out half the dull-blue landscape below, which had the first hour of the night upon it, and the moon, blooming like a lily, with a fair white chalice reflected in the dark deeps of the Tsullakee River. And in this hour while Odalie reached out with all tender, tremulous hope to the future the savage told of the past.

Of the past,—mysterious, mythical. Of the strange lack of tradition of this new world that was yet so old. For here, in the midst of the Cherokee hunting-ground,—the whole country was but a great uninhabited park heavily stocked with game, the Cherokee settlements being merely a fringe upon its verges,—were vestiges of a previous population; remains of works of defense like forts; fragments of pottery and other manufactures; unfading allegorical paintings high on the face of inaccessible cliffs; curious tiny stone sarcophagi containing pygmy bones, the mysterious evidence of the actual existence of the prehistoric "little people";[4] great burial mounds, with moldering skeletons, and caves entombing mummies of splendid stature and long yellow hair, evidently placed there ages ago, still wearing ornaments of beads and metals, with remnants of strange fabrics of fibers and feathers, and with weapons befitting a high rank and a warlike race. And who were they? And whence did they come? They were always here, said Willinawaugh. So said all the Cherokees. They were always here.

And whither did this unknown people go? The Indian shook his head, the flicker of the fire on his painted face. They were gone, he said, when the Tsullakee came. Long gone—long gone!

And alas, what was their fate? Odalie looked about at the violet night, at the white moon and the dun shadows, with an upbraiding question, and the night was silent with a keen chill fall of a frost. This was no new world into which they were adventuring. It had witnessed tragedies. It held death. It sealed its lips and embodied oblivion. Oh, for the hopes of the future,—and oh, for the hopes of the dead and gone past!