sometimes, when Oostogah was gone for days together, she was so lonely
that she would venture down through the swamp to peep out at the
water-mill and the two or three houses which the white people had
built. The miller, of all the white people, was the one that she liked
best to watch, he was so big and round, and jolly; and one day, when
he had met her in the path, he did not call her "Injun," or "red
nigger," as the others did, but had said: "Where's your brother, my
dear?" just as if she were white. She saw, sometimes, his two little
girls and boy playing about the mill-door, and they were round and
fat, and jolly, just like their father.

At last, one day Oostogah went down to the mill, and Donee plucked up
her courage and followed him. When she was there hiding close behind
the trough in which the horses were watered, so that nobody could see
her, she heard the miller say to her brother: "You ought to go to work
to clear your land, my lad. In two years there will be hundreds of
people moving in here, and you own the best part of the valley."

Oostogah nodded. "The whole country once belonged to my people."

"That's neither here nor there," said the miller. "Dead chickens don't
count for hatching. You go to work now and clear your land, and you
can sell it for enough to give you and this little girl behind the
trough an education. Enough to give you both a chance equal to any
white children."

Oostogah nodded again, but said nothing. He was shrewd enough, and
could work, too, when he was in the humor. "Come, Donee," he said.

But the miller's little Thad. and Jenny had found Donee behind the