drawn from existing
manners and customs, to prove that the peopling of the western continent
by the race who at present occupy it took place at a period, which may
well have permitted their drawing upon classic models for a portion of
their beautiful figures and allegories. Unhappily, our desire to know
them thoroughly and truly has only been awakened since their minds have
been _corrupted_, and the strong traits of their character blunted by a
participation in our enervating and demoralising _comforts_! They can
now be studied only in the reports made of them by early travellers.

THE MOTHER OF THE WORLD.

A TRADITION OF THE DOG-RIBS.

In the frozen regions of the North, beyond the lands which are now the
hunting-grounds of the Snakes and Coppermines, there lived, when no
other being but herself _was_, a woman who became the mother of the
world. She was a little woman, our fathers told us, not taller than the
shoulders of a young maiden of our nation, but she was very beautiful
and very wise. Whether she was good-tempered or cross, I cannot tell,
for she had no husband, and so there was nothing to vex her, or to try
her patience. She had not, as the women of our nation now have, to pound
corn, or to fetch home heavy loads of buffalo flesh, or to make
snow-sledges, or to wade into the icy rivers to spear salmon, or basket
kepling, or to lie concealed among the wet marsh grass and wild rice to
snare pelicans, and cranes, and goosanders, while her lazy,
good-for-nothing husband lay at home, smoaking his pipe, and drinking
the pleasant juice of the Nishcaminnick by the warm fire in his cabin.
She had only to procure her own food, and this was the berries, and
hips, and sorrel, and rock-moss, which, being found plentifully near her
cave, were plucked with little trouble. Of these she gathered, in their
season, when the sun beamed on the earth like a maiden that loves and is
beloved, a great deal to serve her for food when the snows hid the earth
from her sight, and the cold winds from the fields of eternal frost
obliged her to remain in her rude cavern. Though alone, she was happy.
In the summer it was her amusement to watch the juniper and the alders,
as they put forth, first their leaves, and then their buds, and when the
latter became blossoms, promising to supply the fruit she loved, her
observation became more curious and her feelings more interested; then
would her heart beat with the rapture of a young moth