h home?
Nay! These are toys of his fancy! If he have cheated us so,
How is there truth in his image--the man that he fashioned of snow?"

Wroth was that maker of pictures--hotly he answered the call:
"Hunters and fishers and trappers, children and fools are ye all!
Look at the beasts when ye hunt them!" Swift from the tumult he broke,
Ran to the cave of his father and told him the shame that they spoke.

And the father of Ung gave answer, that was old and wise in the craft,
Maker of pictures aforetime, he leaned on his lance and laughed:
"If they could see as thou seest they would do what thou hast done,
And each man would make him a picture, and--what would become of my
son?

"There would be no pelts of the reindeer, flung down at thy cave for a
gift,
Nor dole of the oily timber that strands with the Baltic drift;
No store of well-drilled needles, nor ouches of amber pale;
No new-cut tongues of the bison, nor meat of the stranded whale.

"_Thou_ hast not toiled at the fishing when the sodden trammels freeze,
Nor worked the war-boats outward, through the rush of the rock-staked
seas,
Yet they bring thee fish and plunder--full meal and an easy bed--
And all for the sake of thy pictures." And Ung held down his head.

"_Thou_ hast not stood to the aurochs when the red snow reeks of the
fight;
Men have no time at the houghing to count his curls aright:
And the heart of the hairy mammoth thou sayest they do not see,
Yet they save it whole from the beaches and broil the best for thee.

"And now do they press to thy pictures, with open mouth and eye,
And a little gift in the doorway, and the praise no gift can buy:
But--sure they have doubted thy pictures, and that is a grievous
stain--
Son that can see so clearly, return them their gifts again."

And Ung looked down at his deerskins--their broad shell-tasselled
bands--
And Ung drew downward his mitten and looked at his naked hands;
And he gloved himself and departed, and he heard his father, behind:
"Son that can see so clearly, rejoice that thy tribe is blind!"

Straight on that glittering ice-field, by the caves of the lost
Dordogne,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fell to his scribing on bone--
Even to mammoth editions. Gaily he whistled and