All the brute eyes—knightly elk, kingly bison, and currish wolves—were turned toward the top where Wa-bog-aha and Hewgaw stood, casting their valuables, as appeasing morsels, into the hissing spring. It refused to be quieted. Suddenly, the lovers were nowhere visible, and the salt storm ceased. Nothing could be found by the afflicted father, except a tress of his daughter's hair—perhaps her chignon.
The old chief declared that, just as the end was approaching, the clouds were full of beautiful colors, and the air glittered with diamonds. The white man's science, however, coldly assumes that these appearances were only the rainbows and their reflections, playing amidst the crystal salt shower.
Sabbath morning dawned upon our camp, and according to our usual custom, we lay by for the day. At ten o'clock, the Professor read the morning service. It must have been a strange scene that we presented, while uncouth teamsters and all—our family-pew the wide valley, with its seats of stones, and logs—sat listening to the beautiful language that told how the faith of which Christianity was born was cradled in a land as primitive and desolate as that which we were traversing. There, the wild Arab hordes hovered over the deserts; here, America's savage tribes do the same over the plains.
Our priest stood near one of Nature's grandest altar pieces, "Waconda Da." Reverence from the most irreverent is secured among such scenes and solitudes. Away from his fellows, man's soul instinctively looks upward, and yearns for some power mightier than himself to which to cling. The brittle straw of Atheism snaps when called upon for support under these circumstances, and the blasphemy which was bold and loud among the haunts of men, here is hushed into silence, or even awed into reverential fear.
The Professor improved the opportunity to deliver an excellent discourse upon the wonderful evidences of God's power which geology is daily revealing. His peroration was quite flowery, and in a strain very much as follows:
"Science is yet in its infancy, and many things which seem dark to us will be clear to our descendants. Future generations will doubtless wonder at our boiler explosions, and our railroad accidents. Lightning expresses will be used only for freight, while machines navigating the air, at one hundred miles an hour, will carry the passengers. Steam, electricity, and the magnetic needle have all been open to man's appropriative genius ever since the world offered him a home, and yet he has only just now comprehended them. The future will see instruments boring thousands of feet into the earth in a day, and developing measures and mysteries which the world is not now ripe for understanding. Perhaps, the telescopes of another century may bring our descendants face to face with the life of the heavenly bodies, and give us glimpses of the inhabitants at their daily avocations. Who knows but that the beings who people other worlds in the infinite ocean of space around us, compared with which worlds our little planet is insignificant indeed, are able, by the use of more powerful instruments than any with which we are acquainted, to hold us in constant review? Our battles they may look upon as we would the conflicts of ants, and they wonder, perchance, why so quarrelsome a world is permitted to exist at all."
Next morning Sachem was up at daybreak, examining the spot where Hewgaw and Wa-bog-aha met their fate, and underwent their iridescent annihilation. His offering to their memory we found after breakfast, tacked up in a prominent position beside the spring. The inscription, evidently intended as a sort of epitaph, was written on the cover of a cracker-box, and struck me as so peculiar that I was at the pains of transcribing it among our notes. I give it to the reader for the purpose, principally, of showing the unconquerable antipathies of an alderman.
Lot's wife, you remember, looked back,
(What woman could ever refrain?)
And instantly stood in her track
A pillar of salt on the plain.
If all were thus cursed for the fault,
Who peep when forbidden to look,
The feminine pillars of salt
Could never be written in book.
Hewgaw was an Indian belle
Which no one could ring—she was fickle;
Some scores of her lovers there fell
(Where she did at last) in a pickle.
Thus salt is the only thing known
Entirely certain of keeping
Flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone,
Out of the habit of peeping.
Unless the tradition has lied,
Our maiden may claim, with good reason,
That she is a well-preserved bride,
And certainly bride of a season.
Wa-bog-aha big was a brave—
The Great Spirit salted him down:
Braves seldom get corned in the grave,
They 're oftener corned in the town.
My rhyming, you find, is saline,
Quite brackish its toning and end;
The moral—far better to pine
Than wed and get "salted," my friend.