anything they liked so much should have belonged to the Mound-Builders.

"Why, that was what _we_ called it!" he agreed, smiling. "Our mothers
used to stir it in the pot with pounded hickory nuts and bears' grease.
Good eating! And the trading trips! Some of our men used to go as far as
Little River for chert which they liked better for arrow-points than our
own flints, being less brittle and more easily worked. That was a canoe
trip, down the Scioto, down the O-hey-yo, up the Little Tenasa as far as
Little River. There was adventure enough to please everybody.

"That bird-shaped mound," he pointed, "was built the time we won the
Eagle-Dancing against all the other villages."

The Mound-Builder drew out from under his feather robe a gorget of pearl
shell, beautifully engraved with the figure of a young man dancing in an
eagle-beaked mask, with eagles' wings fastened to his shoulders.

"Most of the effigy mounds," he said, taking the gorget from his neck to
let the children examine it, "were built that way to celebrate a treaty
or a victory. Sometimes," he added, after a pause, looking off across
the wide flat mounds between the two taller ones, "they were built like
these, to celebrate a defeat. It was there we buried the Tallegewi who
fell in our first battle with the Lenni-Lenape."

"Were they Mound-Builders, too?" the children asked respectfully, for
though the man's voice was sad, it was not as though he spoke of
an enemy.

"People of the North," he said, "hunting-people, good foes and good
fighters. But afterward, they joined with the Mengwe and drove us from