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“Where were you taught to speak English so well, Hemlock?”

“I did not need to be taught; I learnt it with the Iroquois. I was born near an English settlement and my choice companion was an English girl, we played together, and were taught together by the missionary; long after, she became my wife.”

“But you are not a Christian?”

“No; when I saw the white man’s ways I wanted not his religion.”

“And your wife, is she living?”

“Hemlock does not lay his heart open to the stranger; he is alone in the world.”

Respecting his reserve, and tho’ curious to know if the guardian-spirit of the chasm had spoken to him in his dreams, Morton changed the subject, the more so as he did not wish his companion to know that he had been the unwitting witness of his invocation ceremonial. He asked about the chasm in whose solemn depths they found shelter, and Hemlock told how it had been known to all the seven nations of the Iroquois and regarded by them as a chosen abode of the spirits, the more so as its origin was supernatural. There had been a very rainy season and the beavers had their villages flooded and were in danger of being destroyed. Two of them volunteered to visit the spirit-land and beseech the help of their oki, which he promised. He came one dark night and with a single flap of his tail smote the rock, splitting it in two and allowing the waters to drain into the low country beneath. Morton listened gravely, seeing his companion spoke in all seriousness, and thought the tale might be an Indian version of the earthquake, or other convulsion of nature, by which the bed of sandstone had been rent asunder, and a channel thus afforded for the surplus waters of the adjoining heights. The trees and bushes which had found an airy foothold in crevices, and the weather-beaten and lichened faces of the cliffs, told how remote that time must have been.