, whose wife, when she saw the flood
approaching, leaped into the box, and the waves, carrying her off,
landed her at the very spot where was her mother's lodge.
Monedo Kway was overjoyed, but when she opened the box she found her
daughter, indeed, but her beauty had almost all departed. However, she
loved her still, because she was her daughter, and now thought of the
young man who had come to seek her in marriage. She sent a formal
message to him, but he had heard of all that had occurred, and his
love for the girl had died away.
"I marry your daughter!" replied he. "Your daughter! no, indeed! I
shall never marry her!"
The storm that brought the girl back was so strong that it tore away a
large part of the shore of the lake and swept off Ishkwon Daimeka's
lodge, the fragments of which, lodging in the straits, formed those
beautiful islands which are scattered in the St. Clair and Detroit
rivers. As to Ishkwon Daimeka himself, he was drowned, and his bones
lie buried under the islands. As he was carried away by the waves on a
fragment of his lodge, the old man was heard lamenting his fate in a
song.
THE SPIRITS AND THE LOVERS.
At the distance of a woman's walk of a day from the mouth of the
river, called by the pale-faces the Whitestone, in the country of the
Sioux, in the middle of a large plain, stands a lofty hill or mound.
Its wonderful roundness, together with the circumstance of its
standing apart from all other hills, like a fir-tree in the midst of a
wide prairie, or a man whose friends and kindred have all descended to
the dust, has made it known to all the tribes of the West. Whether it
was created by the Great Spirit or filled up by the sons of men,
whether it was done in the morning of the world, ask not me, for I
cannot tell you. Know it is called by all the tribes of the land the
Hill of Little People, or the Mountain of Little Spirits. No gifts can
induce an Indian to visit it; for why should he incur the anger of the
Little People who dwell in it, and, sacrificed upon the fire of their
wrath, behold his wife and children no more? In all the marches and
counter-marches of the Indians, in all their goings and returnings, in
all their wanderings by day or by night to and from lands which lie
beyond it, their paths are so ordered that none approaches near
enough to disturb the tiny inhabitants of the hill. The memory of the
red-man of the forest has preserved but one instance when their
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