edious winter weather.

The fire would show, too, how gayly bedight and feather-crested was
Amoyah, wearing a choice garb of furs;--often, so great was his vanity,
his face was elaborately painted as if for some splendid festive
occasion, a dance or the ball-play, instead of merely to impress with
his magnificence this simple domestic circle. Tus-ka-sah dated the
events that followed from one night when this facial decoration of his
rival was even more fantastic than usual. Like a fish was one side of
the young Cherokee's profile; the other in glaring daubs of white and
black and red craftily represented the head of a woodpecker. The effect
in front was the face of a nondescript monster, that only a gleeful
laughing eye, and now and then a flash of narrow white teeth, identified
as the jovial Amoyah, the Pigeon of Ioco.

The snow lay on the ground without, he said as he shook a wreath of it
from a fold of his fur and it fell hissing among the coals. The shadows
were long, he told them, for the moon was up and the world was dimly
white and duskily blue. The wind was abroad, and indeed they could hear
the swirl of its invisible wings as it swooped past; the boughs of the
trees clashed together and ice was in the Tennessee River. The winter
had come, he declared.

Not yet, Tus-ka-sah pragmatically averred. There would be fine weather
yet.

For the snowfall so early in the season was phenomenal and the red
leaves were still clinging to the trees.

Had they been together among men Amoyah would not have cared enough for
the subject to justify contention, but in the presence of women he would
suffer no contradiction. He must needs be paramount,--the infinitely
admired! He shook his head.

The winter had surely come, he insisted. Why, he argued, the bears
knew,--they always knew! And already each had walked the round with his
shadow.

For in the approach of winter, in the light of the first mystic, icicled
moon, the night when it reaches its full, a grotesque pageant is afoot
in that remote town of the bears, immemorially fabled to be hidden in
the dense coverts of the Great Smoky Mountains,--the procession of the
bears, each walking with his shadow, seven times around the illuminated
spaces of the "beloved square."

The bears knew undoubtedly, the "second man," the man of facts and
method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that
already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his