FOREST AND STREAM. 
49 
July 14. 1906.! 
over a small fire, and looking up, invited me to 
alight and eat with him. “It is a badger,” he 
said, “that I have just killed.” 
“But,” I expostulated, “they are not good to 
eat. I never heard of anyone eating badgers, 
did you?” 
“My son,” he replied, deliberately turning the 
meat over the glowing coals, “everything that 
God has made, has some use, if we could only 
discern it. This badger now, He made it; I am 
very hungry; therefore, I broil its meat—I 
killed it and it is mine—and I shall satisfy my 
hunger.” 
“But see here,” I went on, dismounting and 
sitting down by his fire, “When you are travel¬ 
ing around this way, why don’t you have a well- 
filled ‘grub’ box in your wagon?” 
“I had; there is the box, you see; but save 
for a little salt and pepper, it is now empty. 
The people I visited were very poor, and I gave 
them 4II.” 
There you have it in a word. They gave 
them all, those Jesuits of the frontier. All their 
strength and endurance, bodily and mental; gave 
even the necessities of life, in their zeal to 
“gather the heathen into the shelter of the 
cross.” This same man, at the age of sixty; 
have I not known him more than once to start 
out at dusk and drive wildly, madly, all night 
through a forty degrees below blizzard, to 
reach the bedside of some dying Indian who 
had sent for him to administer the last sacra¬ 
ment! 
“Mistaken zeal.” “Folly.” Many of us may 
say. Well, granting that, yet must we still re¬ 
gard with reverence and something akin to awe, 
the men who dare all things, endure all things, 
for the faith that is in their hearts. 
But to continue my story: Arrived home, I 
stabled my horse, and went to my room to 
hang up my chaps and spurs. I found Nat-ah'- 
ki in bed, her eyes swollen with weeping; and 
when she saw me, she sprang up and clung to 
me crying: “They are dead, both dead! My 
daughter, my handsome daughter, Always 
Laughs; they two who loved each other so 
much, both are dead! Both drowned in the 
everywheres water.”* 
And then she told me, little by little, as she 
could between her fits of sobbing, of what 
Berry had read in the newspaper received that 
morning. Ashton’s boat had foundered in a 
great storm, and all on board were lost. I 
sought out Berry, and he handed me the paper 
in silence. It was all too true. We were never 
again to see Ashton and Diana. Their yacht 
and all it held, lay at the bottom of the Gulf of 
Mexico. 
That was a sad time for us all. Berry and 
his wife went to their room. Old Mrs. Berry 
and the Crow Woman were mourning and cry¬ 
ing, away down by the river. I went back to com¬ 
fort Nat-ah'-ki if I could, and the men cooked 
their supper. I talked long, far into the night 
with the little woman, saying all I could, every¬ 
thing I could think of, to allay her grief—and 
my own too; but in the‘end, it was she who 
solved the problem, in a way. I had thrown 
another chunk or two on the fire, and leaned 
back in .my chair. She had been silent some 
little time. “Come here,” she finally said. So 
I went over and sat down beside her, and she 
grasped my hand with her own trembling one. 
“I have been thinking this,” she began, falter- 
ingly; but her voice became firmer as she went 
on, “This: They died together, didn’t they. 
Yes. I think that when they saw that they 
must drown, they clung one to another, and said 
a few words, if they had time, and even kissed 
each other, no matter if there were other peo¬ 
ple there. That is what we would have done, is 
it not?” 
“Yes.” 
“Well then,” she concluded, “it isn’t so bad 
as it might have been, for one was not left to 
mourn for the other. We must all die some¬ 
time, but I think the Sun and the white man’s 
God favor those whom—loving each other as 
they did—they permit to die that way.” 
She got up. and removing from wall and shelf 
various little gifts Diana had given her, packed 
them carefully away in the bottom of a trunk. 
“I cannot bear to look at them now,” she said 
sadly, “but some day, when I am more used to 
it, I will take them out and set them in their 
places.” 
She went back tp bed and fell asleep, while 
I sat long after by the waning fire, thinking 
much upon her words. More and more, as the 
years went by, I realized that Nat-ah'-ki was— 
well, I’ll not say what I thought. Perhaps some 
of you, of sympathetic nature, can fill in the 
blank. 
It was. several years before Diana’s gifts 
again took their place in our abode to delight 
the eye and the mind of the dwellers therein. 
But many a time did I see Nat-ah'-ki 
quietly take a picture of her daughter from the 
trunk, and after gazing at it lovingly., go away 
by herself to mourn. s 
Walter B. Anderson. 
[to be continued.] 
Dragon Flies. 
Much has been written in. this country and 
Europe about dragon flies, but for the folk lore 
and poetry of the subject we must go to- Japan. 
It is curious to note that the Island Empire was 
once actually called after the dragon fly. 
Says Lafcadio Hearn: “One of the old names 
cf Japan is Akitswshima, meaning, ‘The Island 
of the Dragon Fly,’ and written with the char¬ 
acter representing a dragon fly—which insect, 
now called tombo, was anciently called akitsu.” 
“In a literal sense,” continues Hearn, “Japan 
well deserves to be called the Land of the Dragon 
Fly; for as Rein poetically declared, it is ‘a true 
Eldorado to the Neuroptera fancier. Probably no 
other country of either temperate zone possesses 
so many kinds of dragon flies; and I doubt 
whether even the tropics can produce any dragon 
flies more curiously beautiful than some of the 
Japanese species.’” 
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that so 
aesthetic and fanciful a people as the Japanese 
should have adopted the dragon fly, so to speak. 
The author already quoted tells us again: 
“They made verses about all its habits and 
peculiarities, even about such matters as the queer 
propensity of the creature to return many times in 
succession to any spot once chosen for a perch. 
Sometimes they praised the beauty of its wings, 
and compared them to the wings of devas or 
Buddhist angels; sometimes they celebrated the 
imponderable grace of its hovering—the ghostly 
stillness and lightness of its motion; and some¬ 
times they jested about its waspish appearance of 
anger, or about the goblin oddity of its stare. 
They noticed the wonderful way in which it can 
change the direction of its course, or reverse the 
play of its wings with the sudden turn that sug¬ 
gested the modern Japanese word for a somer¬ 
sault-—tombogaeri (‘dragon fly turning’). In the 
dazzling rapidity of its flight—invisible but as a 
needle-gleam of darting color—they found a 
similitude for impermanency. But they per¬ 
ceived that this lightning flight was of short dura¬ 
tion, and that the dragon fly seldom travels far, 
unless pursued, preferring to flit about one spot 
all day long. Some thought it worth while to 
record in verse that at sunset all the dragon flies 
flock toward the glow, and that they rise high in 
air when the sun sinks below the horizon-—as if 
they hoped to obtain from the altitudes one last 
sight of the vanishing splendor. They remarked 
that the dragon fly cares nothing for flowers, and 
is apt to light upon stakes or stones rather than 
upon blossoms; and they wondered what pleasure 
it could find in resting on the rail of a fence or 
upon the horn of a cow. Also they marveled at 
its stupidity when attacked with sticks or stones 
—as often living toward the danger as away from 
it. But they sympathized with its struggles in 
the spider’s net, and rejoiced to see it burst 
through the meshes.” 
The following are some samples of their charm¬ 
ing little verses of which, it is said, there are 
hundreds and even thousands: 
“Nagare-yuku 
Awa in yume miru 
Tombo kana. 
(Lo! the dragon fly dreams a dream above the flowing 
of the foam bubbles!) 
Tombo ya! 
Hana ni wa yorade 
Ishi no ue. 
(O the dragon fly [—heedless of the flowers, he lights 
upon a stone!) 
Tombo no 
Ila-ura ni sabishi— 
Aki-shigure. 
(Lonesomely clings the dragon fly to the underside of 
the leaf—Ah! the autumn rains!) 
It will be observed what a naive feeling for 
nature is shown in the above. 
In this country children are taught to rather 
dread the dragon fly—one old saw having it that 
the insect sews up the eyes of boys and girls 
(apropos, I suppose, of its alias of “the devil s 
darning needle”). Not so in Japan. There the 
dragon fly hunt is an established institution 
among the rising generation, and is pursued with 
songs and jubilation. Some of the means of 
capture are the net, a bamboo smeared with bird 
lime and a decoy female. An extraordinary device 
used by the children of the province of Kii is 
thus described: 
A long hair—a woman’s—is procured, and a 
very small pebble is attached to each end of it, 
so as to form a miniature “bolas,” and this is 
slung high into the air. A dragon fly pounces 
upon the passing object; but the moment that he 
seizes it, the hair twists round his body, and the 
weight of the pebbles bring him to the ground. 
Much could be added about art in its relation 
to the dragon fly, but the curious reader is re¬ 
ferred to- the libraries, which teem with works 
descriptive of that, in a sense, newly discovered 
country which has set us all marveling and ad¬ 
miring. 
In conclusion it may be said that whether or no 
the cult of Bushido has made Japan great, the 
cult of nature has certainly made her happy. 
Frank Moonan. 
The Seasons in a Flower Garden. By Louise 
Shelton. Cloth. Illustrated. 117 pages. 
Miss Shelton’s book is a'11 attractively put to¬ 
gether, practical guide for the use of amateurs. 
It is a condensed record of garden wisdom, espe¬ 
cially prepared for those who have small gardens, 
where space must be made the most of, in order 
to give variety. There are some directions on 
plans, planting and soil, and the book then fol¬ 
lows the order of the months, beginning with 
September. Winter breaks this order, which be¬ 
gins again in March. 
In Part III. there is much general information. 
The wild garden and the water garden are both 
briefly treated, and attention is given to shrubs, 
roses, the seed bed, hot bed and the protection 
of the garden against those pests which make 
life a burden to the gardener. 
The illustrations are beautiful reproductions 
of photographs of garden plans, and the whole 
book is a useful manual for the amateur. Price 
$1.00 net. 
*Mo-to-yi' awk-bi —The ocean. 
