compatriots long enough to convince them that the exemption of one
Indian baby would not invalidate this theory. And he took her to his
home,--a pastoral clearing on the banks of the Salmon River,--where she
was cared for after a frontier fashion.

Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of
the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers
she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient. She
lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely
abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging like a chrysalis
to a convenient bough. She lied and she stole,--two unpardonable sins
in a frontier community, where truth was a necessity and provisions were
the only property. Worse than this, the outskirts of the clearing
were sometimes haunted by blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she
had mysterious confidences. Mr. Walker more than once regretted his
indiscreet humanity; but she presently relieved him of responsibility,
and possibly of bloodguiltiness, by disappearing entirely.

When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent village of Logport, in
the capacity of housemaid to a trader's wife, who, joining some little
culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to instruct her
charge. But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil to even so
liberal a teacher. She accepted the alphabet with great good-humor,
but always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in which all interest
expired at the completion of each lesson. She found a thousand uses
for her books and writing materials other than those known to civilized
children. She made a curious necklace of bits of slate-pencil, she
constructed a miniature canoe from the pasteboard covers of her primer,
she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed the faces of her
younger companions with blue ink. Religious instruction she received as