This Mohawk girl was attractive, young, and had a partial English
education. Her parents were fairly prosperous, owners of many
acres, and much forest and timber country. The arrangement was
regarded as an ideal one--the young people as perfectly and
diplomatically mated as it was possible to be; but when his parents
approached the young chief with the proposition, he met it with
instant refusal.
"My father, my mother," he begged, "I ask you to forgive me this
one disobedience. I ask you to forgive that I have, amid my fight
and struggle for English education, forgotten a single custom of my
people. I have tried to honor all the ancient rules and usages of
my forefathers, but I forgot this one thing, and I cannot, cannot do
it! My wife I must choose for myself."
"You will marry--whom, then?" asked the old chief.
"I have given no thought to it--yet," he faltered.
"Yes," said his mother, urged by the knowing heart of a woman,
"yes, George, you have thought of it."
"Only this hour," he answered, looking directly into his mother's
eyes. "Only now that I see you want me to give my life to someone
else. But my life belongs to the white girl, Mrs. Evans' sister, if
she will take it.
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