"What is it for?" the Indians asked.
"It is to help me when all other help is gone," she said.
And the Indians were silent, mystified.
She planted slips of grapes brought from the sunny slopes; these she tended, dug about, trained and trimmed. The wonderful Scuppernong Grape was her own evolution. By care and culture it covered the cabin where she lived, and reached out to an oak a hundred feet beyond.
She showed the Indians how to double their crops of corn, how to grow such melons as the Indian world had never before known.
She taught them that it was much better to work and produce flowers, grain, grapes, and make pictures on the rocks than to roam the woods aimlessly, looking for something to kill.
She told them that the Great Spirit loved people who were kind and useful, and temperate in the use of the juice of the grape and in all other good things. So the Croatoans advanced and grew in intelligence quite beyond any of the other Indian tribes on the Atlantic coast. One day White Doe sat at the door of her cabin, under the great vine where hung the grapes.
She was intently painting a picture on buckskin.
The white doe was nibbling at the bushes only a few feet away.