canieu or war-eagle, you needed not ask who did
it--you might be sure it was Menana. Her voice was the sweetest thing
ever heard, her face the most beautiful ever seen--the first had in it
the melody of birds, with the expression they can never have till they
are gifted with the reason given to man--the last--but what is so
beautiful as the face of a beautiful woman! And then her laugh was as
joyous as a dance of warriors after a great victory, and her foot was
the speediest foot that ever brushed the dew from the grass. Every
body loved her, and she loved every body. So kind, and so good, and so
sweet-tempered, and so beautiful a maiden, was never known among the
Ottawas, famed as they are throughout the land for kind, and good, and
sweet-tempered, and beautiful maidens.

She was not the daughter of an Ottawa woman, or any other woman, nor
was her father an Ottawa man, or any other man. She was the daughter
of the mighty cataract. The moon in which she came to the land of the
Ottawas was the moon in which the forest trees put forth their
earliest buds, and the blooming takes place of the little blue flower,
which our forest maidens love to twine with their hair, and our forest
boys to gather as the harbinger of returning warmth, and joy, and
gladness. She came not at first to the village of the Ottawas in the
perfect shape of a human being. It was many years before that, one
morning, as the head warrior of the nation went out, as was his wont,
to look abroad on the early sky, he found sitting at his door a little
creature of a form such as he had never beheld, nor ever dreamed of.
Woman she seemed from her waist upward, but fish or rather two fishes
below. Her face was that of a most beautiful maiden in the charming
hours when she begins to dream of tall youths; her eyes were blue as
the deepest tinge of the water, and mild as a summer morning, her
teeth white as the teeth of a salmon, and her locks fell sweeping the
very earth. Her hands and arms were perfectly shaped, but they were
covered with scales, and here and there tinted with red, which
glittered like the evening sun on the folds of a cloud. Her height was
about that of a small child who is just beginning to use its feet. The
strange little creature did not stir as the warrior approached it, but
suffered him to survey it unmoved, and, when he kindly wiped the dew
from its waving locks, bent its eyes upon him with the deepest
gratitude depicted in its countena