, muttering and
angry.

The same woman brought the poor naked lady to her wigwam, quieted her,
found some raw deerskins, and showed her how to cover herself and the
baby with them.

The tribe among which they now were had borne the famine for two years;
their emaciated and hunger-bitten faces gave fiercer light to their
gloomy, treacherous eyes. Their sole food was fish and palmetto-berries,
both of which were scant. Nothing could have been more unwelcome than
the advent of this crowd of whites, bringing more hungry mouths to fill;
and, indeed, there is little reason to doubt that the first intention
was to put them all to death. But, after the second day, Dickenson
relates that the chief "looked pleasantly upon my Wife and Child";
instead of the fish entrails and filthy water in which the fish had been
cooked which had been given to the prisoners, he brought clams to Mary,
and kneeling in the sand showed her how to roast them. The Indian women,
too, carried off the baby, knowing that its mother had no milk for it,
and handed it about from one to the other, putting away their own
children that they might give it their food. At which the child, that,
when it had been wrapped in fine flannel and embroidery had been always
nigh to death, began to grow fat and rosy, to crow and laugh as it had
never done before, and kick its little legs sturdily about under their
bit of raw skin covering. Mother Nature had taken the child home, that
was all, and was breathing new lusty life into it, out of the bare
ground and open sky, the sun and wind, and the breasts of these her
children; but its father saw in the change only another inexplicable
miracle of God. Nor does he seem to have seen that it was the child and
its mother who had been a protection and shield to the whole crew and
saved them through this their most perilous strait.

I feel as if I must stop here with the story half told. Dickenson's
narrative, when I finished it, left behind it a fresh, sweet
cheerfulness, as if one had been actually touching the living baby with
its fair little body and milky breath; but if I were to try to reproduce
the history of the famished men and women of the crew during the months
that followed, I should but convey to you a dull and dreary horror.

You yourselves can imagine what the journey on foot along the bleak
coast in winter, through tribe after tribe of hostile savages, must have
been to delicately nurtured men and women, naked bu