After I have smoked my big pipe out and drunk my nightcap down, and seen that all the servants are a-bed--for we live in her old house in the same way her father and his fathers lived before us--I go to my rest and, as I pass to it, look in to her retiring-room to give her one fond, good-night kiss. Yet, often, ere I pull aside the hangings, I have to pause and stand reverently without. For many a time that room has become a shrine; within that shrine there is a saint. A saint upon her knees, her fair white hands clasped, and in those hands her golden head buried. A saint who prays to her God to bless her husband and her children ever; a saint who thinks of nought for herself but of all for those dear to her, and who, in that self-forgetfulness, finds her deepest happiness.
Than to possess such a fond heart as this there is no more to be asked.
[Footnote 1: A gossiping, chatting, or drinking place.]
[Footnote 2: The mastiffs in Virginia were trained to worry figures dressed as Indians, as well as being always taken out in any foray or chase after either a band of them or an individual, and the antipathy between these dogs and the savages was always very marked.]
[Footnote 3: Unfortunately, such was the class of ministers who originally went out to the American colonies (they generally being outcasts from their own country) that, in this instance, Roderick St. Amande was not only speaking the truth but also representing very accurately the common feeling of the Indian tribes towards the colonial clergyman.]
[Footnote 4: The incident of the Indian woman's mercy is not fictitious.]
[Footnote 5: Indians taken prisoners by the colonists were sometimes sold into slavery in Canada or the West Indies, where they generally died soon.]
[Footnote 6: So called from the poles smeared with blood which were erected before the Seminoles' tents when on the warpath. The French settlers also termed them "Bâtons Rouges," whence the name of the old capital of Louisiana.]