On this most beautiful beach of smooth white pebbles, interspersed with
agates and cornelians, for those who know how to find them, we stepped,
not like the Indian, with some humble offering, which, if no better than
an arrow-head or a little parched corn, would, he judged, please the
Manitou, who looks only at the spirit in which it is offered. Our visit
was so far for a religious purpose that one of our party went to inquire
the fate of some Unitarian tracts left among the woodcutters a year or
two before. But the old Manitou, though, daunted like his children by
the approach of the fire-ships which he probably considered demons of a
new dynasty, he had suffered his woods to be felled to feed their pride,
had been less patient of an encroachment, which did not to him seem so
authorized by the law of the strongest, and had scattered those leaves
as carelessly as the others of that year.
But S. and I, like other emigrants, went not to give, but to get, to
rifle the wood of flowers for the service of the fire-ship. We returned
with a rich booty, among which was the uva ursi, whose leaves the
Indians smoke, with the kinnick-kinnick, and which had then just put
forth its highly-finished little blossoms, as pretty as those of the
blueberry.
Passing along still further, I thought it would be well if the crowds
assembled to stare from the various landings were still confined to the
kinnick-kinnick, for almost all had tobacco written on their faces,
their cheeks rounded with plugs, their eyes dull with its fumes.
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