home, and became daily more and
more unwilling to acknowledge her publicly as my wife.

About this time I had occasion to go to the trading-house on Red River,
and I started in company with a half-breed belonging to that
establishment, who was mounted on a fleet horse. The distance we had to
travel has since been called by the English settlers seventy miles. We
rode and went on foot by turns, and the one who was on foot kept hold of
the horse's tail, and ran. We passed over the whole distance in one day.
In returning, I was by myself, and without a horse, and I made an
effort, intending, if possible, to accomplish the same journey in one
day; but darkness, and excessive fatigue, compelled me to stop when I
was within about ten miles of home.

When I arrived at our lodge, on the following day, I saw
Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa sitting in my place. As I stopped at the door of the
lodge, and hesitated to enter, she hung down her head; but Net-no-kwa
greeted me in a tone somewhat harsher than was common for her to use to
me. 'Will you turn back from the door of the lodge, and put this young
woman to shame, who is in all respects better than you are? This affair
has been of your seeking, and not of mine or hers. You have followed her
about the village heretofore; now you would turn from her, and make her
appear like one who has attempted to thrust herself in your way.' I was,
in part, conscious of the justness of Net-no-kwa's reproaches, and in
part prompted by inclination; I went in and sat down by the side of
Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa, and thus we became man and wife. Old Net-no-kwa had,
while I was absent at Red River, without my knowledge or consent, made
her bargain with the parents of the young woman, and brought her home,
rightly supposing that it would be no difficult matter to reconcile me
to the measure. In most of the marriages which happen between young
persons, the parties most interested have less to do than in this case.
The amount of presents which the parents of a woman expect to receive in
exchange for her diminishes in proportion to the number of husbands she
may have had.

I now began to attend to some of the ceremonies of what may be called
the initiation of warriors, this being the first time I had been on a
war-party. For the first three times that a man accompanies a war-party,
the customs of the Indians require some peculiar and painful
observances, from which old warriors may, if they choose, be exempted.
The youn