Of all the different kinds of people among whom I have lived
the Indians of northern California carry the memory of their
dead the longest, and, I had almost written, feel their loss
the most. I have seen old women, bent with age, rocking their
bodies to and fro with grief in some dry, grass-covered ditch,
moaning as if their hearts were breaking, and upon inquiry have
been told that they were mourning for a husband or children dead
perhaps for years. But from amid the moans of Rachel sorrowing
for her dead children the whisper of hope beyond the grave has
always been present. For underneath the driftwood of their dim
traditions and wild fables handed from father to son from time
immemorial, around the camp-fires at night, with addition here,
subtraction there, and darkness all around, I have always found
among all the tribes that grand conception of a divine being
who created all and who in the hereafter will reward the good
and punish the bad. Everywhere my footsteps have wandered--on
the Klamath and on the Trinity, from the Golden Gate to the
Oregon line--I have encountered the Man-maker, who lives among
the stars and loves his red children--A. G. TASSIN,
_Overland_.
(1240)