"
"And what see you in all this?" demanded the trapper, who, though a
little confused by the terms of his companion, seized the thread of
his ideas.
"A demonstration of my problem, that nature did not make so vast a
region to lie an uninhabited waste so many ages. This is merely the
moral view of the subject; as to the more exact and geological--"
"Your morals are exact enough for me," returned the old man, "for I
think I see in them the very pride of folly. I am but little gifted in
the fables of what you call the Old World, seeing that my time has
been mainly passed looking natur' steadily in the face, and in
reasoning on what I've seen, rather than on what I've heard in
traditions. But I have never shut my ears to the words of the good
book, and many is the long winter evening that I have passed in the
wigwams of the Delawares, listening to the good Moravians, as they
dealt forth the history and doctrines of the elder times, to the
people of the Lenape! It was pleasant to hearken to such wisdom after
a weary hunt! Right pleasant did I find it, and often have I talked
the matter over with the Great Serpent of the Delawares, in the more
peaceful hours of our out-lyings, whether it might be on the trail of
a war-party of the Mingoes, or on the watch for a York deer.
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