family were separated and carried off in various directions. Eunice, the
youngest daughter, about eight years old, was handed over by the
Indians to the mission at St. Louis on their arrival there, and although
many efforts were made on the part of the Governor, who had purchased
and befriended Williams, to ransom her, the Jesuits flatly refused to
give her up. On one occasion he went himself with the minister to St.
Louis. This time the Jesuits, whose authority within their mission
seemed almost to override that of the Governor himself, yielded so far
as to allow the father to see his daughter, on condition that he spoke
to no other English prisoner. He spoke to her for an hour, exhorting her
never to forget her catechism, which she had learned by rote. The
Governor and his wife afterwards did all in their power to procure her
ransom, but of no avail.
"'She is there still,' writes Williams two years later, 'and has
forgotten to speak English.' What grieved him still more, Eunice had
forgotten her catechism." But now we come to this strange
transformation, unprecedented, we think, which made an Indian squaw out
of a white woman. "Eunice, reared among Indian children, learned their
language and forgot her own; she lived in a wigwam of the Caughnawagas,
forgot her catechism, was baptized in the Roman Catholic faith, and in
due time married an Indian of the tribe, who henceforth called himself
Williams. Thus her hybrid children bore her family name.
"Many years after, in 1740, she came, with her husband, to visit her
relatives at Deerfield, dressed as a squaw and wrapped in an Indian
blanket. Nothing would induce her to stay, though she was persuaded on
one occasion to put on a civilized dress and go to church, after which
she impatiently discarded her gown and resumed her blanket."
Could a sadder instance of degeneration be written in the annals of the
human family? "She was kindly treated by her relatives, and no effort
was made to detain her. She came again the following year, bringing two
of her children, and twice afterwards she repeated the visit. She and
her husband were offered land if they would remain, but she positively
refused, saying it would endanger her soul. She lived to a great age, a
squaw to the last. One of her grandsons became a missionary to the
Indians of Green Bay, Wisconsin."
This is one of the most drastic instances of a woman's devotion to
husband, and mother love for children driving her back to the forest of
her ancestors, and making her sacrifice all that her race had gained for
her during thousands of years. Thus the most natural and primitive
instincts of the human race will prevail against all our arts, science
and accomplishments.
THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE
Through the Microscope
Life is full of impossibilities.
After all it is not money we want so much as something to do.
Every man should have an accomplishment of some kind.
Some music is like a jumble of misplaced notes.
If you have reached forty and have done nothing, get busy.
We sometimes lose dollars by being too careful with our cents.
We should try to arrange ourselves so that we will appear as plausible
as possible to posterity.
We must have something to worry about or we will become stagnant.
Music should be rendered slowly and softly so that each note may have
time to tell its story before the next one comes on the stage.
When we are young our time is all present. When we are old there is no
present, but our time becomes the aggregate days and years.
We sometimes get into trouble trying to keep out of it.
It is not what we would _like_ to do, but what we _can_ do.
Let us take our medicine philosophically.
A dollar looks larger going out than it does coming in.
What is that we see falling like grain before the reaper? It is the
days, and the weeks, and the months, and the years.
Every dog wonders why the other dog was born.
We are so constituted in temperament that one may love what the other
hates.
A face is like a song, it has to be learned to be thoroughly
appreciated. You have to acquire a taste for it, and when it is once
memorized it is never forgotten.
Most of our best words are derived from dead, heathen languages.
If you have married the wrong man, or the wrong woman, cheer up and be a
philosopher over it. Philosophy is a good substitute for love if
properly applied.
If you do not go about sniffing the air you will not find so many
obnoxious odors.
If you have a mental wound of any kind, do not mind; time, the great
healer, will cure it.
We despise the ancient heathen, yet in some cases we have risen from his
ashes.
A woman dresses for appearance, not for comfort.
An ounce of domestic harmony is worth a ton of gold.
We should adjust ourselves as much as possible to circumstances.
It is better to be a dummy than to be a gossip.
Every man thinks _his_ dog is an angel.
It is not always the one who can afford it who keeps the hired servant.
Since we can grow a new finger nail, why cannot we grow a new finger?
The mouse is destructive only from man's point of view.
When a man reaches forty he usually settles down to make the best of
things.
Sometimes we are called cranks because we will not be sat upon.
The passing of time so quickly would not be so regrettable were life not
so short.
A good book has no ending.
It is nothing to win a girl if you do not win her love also.
The passing of time so quickly takes the pleasure out of everything.
If you are popular, anything you say will rise into the air like a
Zeppelin. If you are unpopular anything you say or do will sink into the
ocean of oblivion like a Titanic.
It is a pity we have to do so much to get so little.
It sometimes pays to accept a few cents on the dollar and let it go at
that.
Sometimes men become so parasitical to their occupation that, were they
to lose it, they would drown.
"Help ye one another." It pays.
Our mistakes keep us perpetually on the convalescence.
Woman is equal to man--sometimes more than equal.
While the years are with you freeze on to them as tightly as ever you
can.
The "Give-in-to-nothing-or-nobody-for-anything" spirit nurses a great
deal of evil.
It takes forty years for a man to become a philosopher. Some never
graduate.
Our generation is to be pitied. It is living in the most extravagant age
the world has ever known.
When the church does not ameliorate the objectionable dispositions of
its adherents, it has failed in its mission.
It is diplomacy to be on friendly terms with all men.
Politics are sometimes dangerous things.
Be cheerful under all circumstances.
The human race has mounted a treadmill which it must tread or perish.
The strenuous industries of this world are man's unconscious efforts to
preserve his increasing numbers from annihilation.
Courtesy in business is the best policy.
It takes three men's wages to sustain one family in an up-to-date
fashion.
Under the circumstances, it is almost necessary to be greedy and
grasping.
To be perfectly healthy we should adopt the exercises followed by our
ancestors in climbing among the trees.
It is not how much you can do or how quick you get through it, but the
care that you take and how well you can do it.
It is not the gift but the giving.
It is quality, not quantity, that counts.
Do not measure a person's length by your personal prejudices.
The man who never had an enemy is too good for this world.
"You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink." You can
send a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.
The dog hates the cat, and the cat hates the dog, but when they are
friends there are no truer ones.
Just take the world as it is; take things as to be had. Your friends may
not be quite so good, your foes not quite so bad.
It is the aggregate that counts.
The almighty dollar is getting smaller every day.
It is fashionable to be lazy.
Money is man's passport through the world.
The one who is most jealous is the one who is least in love.
Poetry is something that was written by someone who is dead.
Life is one thing after another--getting in between man and his money.
Some men are so small that they could easily go through the eye of a
needle.
Often the man who is the most mean in buying is the most extortionate in
selling.
Some husbands have to prove their love by sending their wives off for a
month's holiday every six weeks.
The cat is one of the most cleanly of animals, yet she has never been
known to take a bath.
"It is an ill wind," etc. The harder the times become to others, the
better they become to the sheriff.
Germany wants to reap where she has not sown.
Misery likes company. It is consolation to know that everybody else is
hard up during these hard times.
In our life struggle we are obliged to sacrifice many of our pet
ambitions.
If a person is not naturally inclined he cannot be influenced by
argument.
When the war is over it will be an easy matter to estimate the German
casualties. She had about sixty-five millions.
The present seems to be a thing of the past.
An honorable defeat is more commendable than an empty triumph.
One half of the war in Europe does not know what the other half is
doing.
Sometimes finance gets men into positions for which they are not
qualified.
We must abandon that ancient superstition that a dollar has any
financial value.
Where a cat and a canary are brought up together, the cat ultimately
gets the canary.
If a man does not support his country during the war, what can he expect
after the war is over?
There is not a misunderstanding but that can be adjusted amicably if it
is gone about in the right spirit.
_Your_ business is not the only important one.
It is a pity the cat would not always remain a kitten.
With the bank man it is more a matter of figures than it is of dollars.
To man, money is like a train going into a tunnel. It goes in at one end
and out at the other, and leaves nothing.
Never judge a person's way by what the other people say.
There are only two sides to business: what I.O.U. and what U.O.I.
Where there is abundance there is likely to be waste and lack of
economy.
A one dollar contra is often used to stave off a hundred dollar account.
"Every crow thinks that _its_ bird is a white one," and every man thinks
that _his_ wife is the right one.
The hieroglyphic signature is often taken as a sign of perfect
commercial attainment.
Some people give and take; others are all take.
Blessed is the man who has no family, for he shall inherit wealth.
Unlucky is the man who has children, for verily I say unto you, they
keep him broke.
The good Samaritan who lends his friend a dollar, sometimes loses both
the friend and the dollar.
The poorer a man the greater his misfortunes.
A great many children go to school to learn to read novels.
It takes as long to become a man as it does to become a philosopher.
Life is far too short judging by the time it takes to collect some of
our accounts.
First, steel made millionaires, then railways, then oil, then pork; and
now it is the automobile.
When two or three women are gathered together no man can tell when the
end will be.
The well-fed philosopher is likely to have a well-fed philosophy; the
under-fed one an emaciated variety.
Habitual melancholy is not always a mental derangement; it is very often
a constitutional weakness.
Live and--let your indorser--learn.
The further you get into the world the less time you have for poetry,
philosophy and sentiment.
The doctor is a man whom we don't want to do any business with.
You seldom meet an enthusiast who is not a crank also.
Individually, dimensions are determined by the proportions of the
observer.
The modern attitude is a contempt for economy. Conservation is a
bugbear.
Your neighbor is not a freak because he does not fall in line with your
way of thinking.
When you have gained your equilibrium, you usually find that it was not
worth while getting mad after all.
[Transcriber's note: In "Of the Foolhardy Expedition," there is
extensive quoting of a text, and the quotes are not always matched. The
punctuation was left as printed.]