creed. He was conservative in every rite and ritual of his race.
He fought his tribal enemies like the savage that he was. He sang
his war-songs, danced his war-dances, slew his foes, but the little
girl-wife from the north he treated with the deference that he gave
his own mother, for was she not to be the mother of his warrior son?

The year rolled round, weeks merged into months, winter into spring,
and one glorious summer at daybreak he wakened to her voice calling
him. She stood beside him, smiling.

"It will be to-day," she said proudly.

He sprang from his couch of wolf-skins and looked out upon the
coming day: the promise of what it would bring him seemed breathing
through all his forest world. He took her very gently by the hand
and led her through the tangle of wilderness down to the water's
edge, where the beauty spot we moderns call Stanley Park bends
about Prospect Point. "I must swim," he told her.

"I must swim, too," she smiled, with the perfect understanding of
two beings who are mated. For, to them, the old Indian custom was
law--the custom that the parents of a coming child must swim until
their flesh is so clear and clean that a wild animal cannot scent
their proximity. If the wild creatures of the forests have no fear
of them, then, and only then, are they fit to become parents, and
to scent a human is in itself a fearsome thing to all wild creatures.

So those two plunged into the waters of the Narrows as the grey dawn
slipped up the eastern skies and all the forest awoke to the life of
a new, glad day. Presently he took her ashore, and smilingly she