shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic.

And now Amoyah's face was wonderful to view, whether as a fish on one
side or a woodpecker on the other, with that most human expression of
surprise and indignation and aversion as distinctly limned upon it as if
in pigments, for he loved the "second man's" facts no more than the
"second man" loved his fancies. How did he know, forsooth? Because,
Amoyah hardily declared, he himself had witnessed the march,--he had
been permitted to behold that weird and grotesque progress!

He took note of the blank silence that ensued upon this startling
asseveration. Then emboldened to add circumstance to sheer statement he
protested, "I attended the ceremony by invitation. I had a place in the
line of march--I walked beside the Great Bear as his shadow!"

For, according to tradition, each bear, burly, upright in the moonlight,
follows the others in Indian file, but at the side of each walks his
shadow, and that shadow is not the semblance of a bear, but of a
Cherokee Indian!

Now, as everybody has heard, the bears were once a band of Cherokee
Indians, but wearying of the rigors and artificialities of tribal
civilization they took to the woods, became bears, and have since dwelt
in seclusion.

The thoughts, however, persistently reach out for the significance of
the fact that in the tradition of this immemorial progress each creature
is accompanied by the shadow, not of the thing that he is, but of the
higher entity that he was designed to be.

Whether this inference is merely the mechanical deduction of a lesson,
or a subtlety of moralizing, with a definite intention, on the part of
the Cherokees, always past-masters in the intricacies of symbolism, it
is difficult to determine, but the bears are certainly not alone in this
illustration of retrogression, and memory may furnish many an image of a
lost ideal to haunt the paths of beings of a higher plane.

The picture was before the eyes of all the fireside group,--the looming
domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, where the clouds, white and opaline,
hung in the intervals beneath the ultimate heights; the silences of the
night were felt in the dense dark lonely forest that encompassed the
open spaces of that mysterious city, with the conical thatched roofs of
its winter houses and the sandy stretch of the "beloved square; "--and
there was the line of bears, clumsy, heavy-footed, lumbering, ungainly,
and beside each the f