for sweetness. So's
the puffs out of the pine woods of afternoons. Come sundown, the frogs
strike up, and later on the fireflies dance in the corn. Oh me, the
fireflies in the corn! We were a week or ten days on the road, tacking
from one place to another--such as Lancaster, Bethlehem-Ephrata--"thou
Bethlehem-Ephrata"--no odds--I loved the going about; and so we jogged
into dozy little Lebanon by the Blue Mountains, where Toby had a
cottage and a garden of all fruits. He come north every year for this
wonderful Seneca Oil the Seneca Indians made for him. They'd never
sell to any one else, and he doctored 'em with von Swieten pills,
which they valued more than their own oil. He could do what he chose
with them, and, of course, he tried to make them Moravians. The
Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and they'd had trouble enough from
white men--Americans and English--during the wars, to keep 'em in that
walk. They lived on a Reservation by themselves away off by their
lake. Toby took me up there, and they treated me as if I was their own
blood brother. Red Jacket said the mark of my bare feet in the dust
was just like an Indian's and my style of walking was similar. I know
I took to their ways all over.'

'Maybe the gipsy drop in your blood helped you?' said Puck.

'Sometimes I think it did,' Pharaoh went on. 'Anyhow Red Jacket and
Cornplanter, the other Seneca chief, they let me be adopted into the
tribe. It's only a compliment, of course, but Toby was angry when I
showed up with my face painted. They gave me a side-name which means
"Two Tongues," because, d'ye see, I talked French and English.

'They had their own opinions (_I_'ve heard 'em) about the French and the
English, _and_ the Americans. They'd suffered from all of 'em during
the wars, and they only wished to be left alone. But they thought a heap
of the President of the United States. Cornplanter had had dealings with
him in some French wars out West when General Washington was only a lad.
His being President afterwards made no odds to 'em. They always called
him Big Hand, for he was a large-fisted man, and he was all of their
notion of a white chief. Cornplanter 'ud sweep his blanket round him,
and after I'd filled his pipe he'd begin--"In the old days, long ago,
when braves were many and blankets were few, Big Hand said----" If Red
Jacket agreed to the say-so he'd trickle a little smoke out of the
corners of his mouth. If he didn't, he'd blow through his n