t about
clothes.... I find she is a good deal of a companion. I see I should be
lonesome and depressed without her, now that I have lost my property.
Another thing, she says it is ordered that we work for our living
hereafter. She will be useful. I will superintend.

TEN DAYS LATER.--She accuses ME of being the cause of our disaster! She
says, with apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured her
that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts. I said I was
innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts. She said the Serpent
informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term meaning an aged and
moldy joke. I turned pale at that, for I have made many jokes to pass
the weary time, and some of them could have been of that sort, though I
had honestly supposed that they were new when I made them. She asked me
if I had made one just at the time of the catastrophe. I was obliged to
admit that I had made one to myself, though not aloud. It was this. I
was thinking about the Falls, and I said to myself, "How wonderful it is
to see that vast body of water tumble down there!" Then in an instant a
bright thought flashed into my head, and I let it fly, saying, "It would
be a deal more wonderful to see it tumble UP there!"--and I was just
about to kill myself with laughing at it when all nature broke loose
in war and death and I had to flee for my life. "There," she said, with
triumph, "that is just it; the Serpent mentioned that very jest, and
called it the First Chestnut, and said it was coeval with the creation."
Alas, I am indeed to blame. Would that I were not witty; oh, that I had
never had that radiant thought!

NEXT YEAR.--We have named it Cain. She caught it while I was up country
trapping on the North Shore of the Erie; caught it in the timber a
couple of miles from our dug-out--or it might have been four, she isn't
certain which. It resembles us in some ways, and may be a relation. That
is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment. The difference
in size warrants the conclusion that it is a different and new kind of
animal--a fish, perhaps, though when I put it in the water to see,
it sank, and she plunged in and snatched it out before there was
opportunity for the experiment to determine the matter. I still think it
is a fish, but she is indifferent about what it is, and will not let
me have it to try. I do not understand this. The coming of the creature
seems to have changed her whole