ody carrying the
words,--

"With the dawn I seek thee!"

[Music: THE OLD MAN'S LOVE SONG.

_Omaha._

Harmonized by PROF. J.C. FILLMORE.

Ha he ha ha he ha he ha we dhe ha dha e ha dhoe,
Um-ba e-don ha-i-don, hu-wi-ne ha, ho e ho wa dho he dhe,
I ha, ha he ho, ho he ho, he ha we dhe dhoe.
Un-ba i-don ha-i-don, hu-wi ne ha, ho e ho ne dho he.]

The young men caught the tune, and sang it as they wooed the maidens;
and the old man smiled as he heard them. "Yes, they are right," he
said. "It is a love-song."

He grew to be a very old man, an old man with a love-song, until it
was only when the warm days came that he could slowly climb the hill
at dawn, and, alone with the breezes and birds, greet the new day with
his song, that both kept and revealed his secret,--the secret of a
love, like the radiant bow, spanning the whole horizon of his life. At
last a time came when his voice was no longer heard.

The tender cadences of his song, fraught with human hope and human
feeling, still linger, and to-day awaken echoes across the barriers of
time and race.

STORY OF THE WE-TO'_N_ SONG.

Many Indian tribes believed it possible for one person to affect
another through the power of the will. This belief gave rise to
peculiar customs and to a class of songs called, in the Omaha tongue,
We'-to_n_, composed and sung by women for the sole purpose of exerting
this power for the benefit of absent warriors.

Unless the village was attacked, women did not take active part in
war. When the men went forth on a long journey to meet the enemy, the
women remained at home, attending to domestic duties. Their thoughts,
however, were with the absent ones; and, under the incentive of the
belief in will power, they would gather in groups at the lodge of the
Leader of the war party, and in the hearing of his family would sing a
We'-to_n_ song, which should carry strength to the far-away warriors
and help them to win the battle.

The words of these songs do not reveal the purpose for which they were
sung, it being one of the peculiarities of the Indian never to
expatiate upon that which to him is apparent. The gathering of the
women at the lodge of the Leader of the war party, the united action
in singing a song never used but for one purpose, made any explanatory
words seem unnecessary. The distinctive mission of the song was to
reach the absent man, who, far from home, was suffering hardship and
facing danger. Upon him