seen her, he became her husband, and she had a
son by him.

One day, not long after this, he did not return at evening, as usual,
from hunting. She waited till late at night, but he came no more.

The next day, she swung her child to sleep in its cradle, and then said
to her dog, "Take care of your brother while I am gone, and when he
cries, halloo for me."

The cradle was made of the finest wampum, and all its bandages and
ornaments were of the same precious stuff.

After a short time, the woman heard the cry of the dog, and running home
as fast as she could, she found her child gone, and the dog too. On
looking around, she saw scattered upon the ground pieces of the wampum
of her child's cradle, and she knew that the dog had been faithful, and
had striven his best to save her child from being carried off, as he had
been, by an old woman, from a distant country, called Mukakee Mindemoea,
or the Toad-Woman.

The mother hurried off at full speed in pursuit, and as she flew along,
she came, from time to time, to lodges inhabited by old women, who told
her at what time the child-thief had passed; they also gave her shoes
that she might follow on. There was a number of these old women who
seemed as if they were prophetesses, and knew what was to come long
beforehand. Each of them would say to her that when she had arrived at
the next lodge, she must set the toes of the moccasins they had given
her pointing homeward, and that they would return of themselves. The
young woman was very careful to send back in this manner all the shoes
she borrowed.

She thus followed in the pursuit, from valley to valley, and stream to
stream, for many months and years; when she came at length to the lodge
of the last of the friendly old grandmothers, as they were called, who
gave her the last instructions how to proceed. She told her that she
was near the place where her son was to be found; and she directed her
to build a lodge of cedar-boughs, hard by the old Toad-Woman's lodge,
and to make a little bark dish, and to fill it with the juice of the
wild grape.

"Then," she said, "your first child (meaning the dog) will come and find
you out."

These directions the young woman followed just as they had been given to
her, and in a short time she heard her son, now grown up, going out to
hunt, with his dog, calling out to him, "Peewaubik--Spirit-Iron--Twee!
Twee!"

The dog soon came into the lodge, and she set before him the dish of