Reminiscent and Personal 



A TRADITION in our family has it 

 that a strain of savagery was 

 brought into it by an ancestor who was 

 stolen by Indians in the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, and who came back to the New 

 England settlements with a red wife. It is 

 a tradition liked by some of us, and pleads 

 heredity for our legs when, without warn- 

 ing, they carry us off to the woods, or up 

 on hill-tops, or out at unseemly hours, to 

 our own astonishment and protest, leaving 

 books unread, work undone, and people 

 waiting to scold us. When my brother and 

 I escape to the wilderness this ancestor 

 takes us in hand, pulls off most of our 

 clothes, ties moccasins on our feet, sets 

 us afloat in canoes, tips us overboard in 

 impish glee, acquaints us with deer and 

 other pretty citizens of the woods, makes 

 the earth and air sweet to us, and puts 

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