impressions mournful and gloomy. As the tide rapidly fell, a great flock
of black brent fluttered by her, screaming and crying. Then the plover
flew up and piped mournfully as they wheeled around the trunk, and at
last fearlessly lit upon it like a gray cloud. Then the heron flew over
and around her, shrieking and protesting, and at last dropped its gaunt
legs only a few yards from her. But, strangest of all, a pretty white
bird, larger than a dove--like a pelican, but not a pelican--circled
around and around her. At last it lit upon a rootlet of the tree, quite
over her shoulder. She put out her hand and stroked its beautiful white
neck, and it never appeared to move. It stayed there so long that she
thought she would lift up the baby to see it, and try to attract her
attention. But when she did so, the child was so chilled and cold, and
had such a blue look under the little lashes which it didn't raise at
all, that she screamed aloud, and the bird flew away, and she fainted.

Well, that was the worst of it, and perhaps it was not so much, after
all, to any but herself. For when she recovered her senses it was bright
sunlight, and dead low water. There was a confused noise of guttural
voices about her, and an old squaw, singing an Indian "hushaby," and
rocking herself from side to side before a fire built on the marsh,
before which she, the recovered wife and mother, lay weak and weary. Her
first thought was for her baby, and she was about to speak, when a young
squaw, who must have been a mother herself, fathomed her thought and
brought her the "mowitch," pale but living, in such a queer little
willow cradle all bound up, just like the squaw's own young one, that
she laughed and cried together, and the young squaw and the old squaw
showed their big white teeth and glinted their black eyes and said,
"Plenty get well, skeena mowitch," "wagee man come plenty soon," and she
could have kissed their brown faces in her joy. And then she found that
they had been gathering berries on the marsh in their queer, comical