curious necklace of bits of slate-pencil, she constructed a miniature canoe from the pasteboard covers of her primer, she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed the faces of her younger companions with blue ink.  Religious instruction she received as good-humoredly, and learned to pronounce the name of the Deity with a cheerful familiarity that shocked her preceptress.  Nor could her reverence be reached through analogy; she knew nothing of the Great Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of the Happy Hunting-Grounds.  Yet she attended divine service regularly, and as regularly asked for a hymn-book; and it was only through the discovery that she had collected twenty-five of these volumes and had hidden them behind the woodpile, that her connection with the First Baptist Church of Logport ceased.  She would occasionally abandon these civilized and Christian privileges, and disappear from her home, returning after several days of absence with an odor of bark and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in the shape of venison or game.

To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen, and, according to the laws of her race, a woman.  I do not think the most romantic fancy would have called her pretty.  Her complexion defied most of those ambiguous similes through which poets unconsciously apologize for any deviation from the Caucasian standard.  It was not wine nor amber colored; if anything, it was smoky.  Her face was tattooed with red and white lines on one cheek, as if a duo-toothed comb had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have been repulsive.  She was short and stout.  In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in moments of contemplation.

I think I have already shown enough to indicate the incongruity of her existence with even the low standard of civilization that obtained at Logport in the year 1860.  It needed but one more fact to prove the far-sighted poetical sagacity and prophetic ethics of those sincere advocates of extermination, to whose virtues I have done but scant justice in the beginning of this article.  This fact was presently furnished by the Princess.  After one of her periodical disappearances,—­this time unusually prolonged,—­she astonished Logport by returning with a half-breed baby of a week old in her arms.  That night a meeting of the hard-featured serious matrons of Logport was held at Mrs. Brown’s.  The immediate banishment of the Princess was demanded.  Soft-hearted Mrs. Brown endeavored vainly to get a mitigation or suspension of the sentence.  But, as on a former occasion, the Princess took matters into her own hands.  A few mornings afterwards, a wicker cradle containing an Indian baby was found hanging on the handle of the door of the First Baptist Church.  It was the Parthian arrow of the flying Princess.  From that day Logport knew her no more.