good-humoredly, and learned to pronounce the name of the Deity with
a cheerful familiarity that shocked her preceptress. Nor could her
reverence be reached through analogy; she knew nothing of the Great
Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of the Happy Hunting-Grounds.
Yet she attended divine service regularly, and as regularly asked for a
hymn-book; and it was only through the discovery that she had collected
twenty-five of these volumes and had hidden them behind the woodpile,
that her connection with the First Baptist Church of Logport ceased. She
would occasionally abandon these civilized and Christian privileges, and
disappear from her home, returning after several days of absence with an
odor of bark and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in the shape
of venison or game.

To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen, and, according to the laws
of her race, a woman. I do not think the most romantic fancy would have
called her pretty. Her complexion defied most of those ambiguous similes
through which poets unconsciously apologize for any deviation from the
Caucasian standard. It was not wine nor amber colored; if anything, it
was smoky. Her face was tattooed with red and white lines on one cheek,
as if a duo-toothed comb had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but
for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone
in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout.
In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque,
and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly
scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in moments of
contemplation.

I think I have already shown enough to indicate the incongruity of her
existence with even the low standard of civilization that obtained
at Logport in the year 1860. It needed but one more fact to prove the