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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

me with what sounded like singing on a comb. She enjoyed it and so did I. Her story I translate to be this: That at one time she had been in the Salem School or under the teaching of Jason Lee; that she had glimpses of a higher life than savagery had given her; that in the years following she had held on to the little she had, stoutly refusing to countenance by her presence the Smohallo incantations. The wigwam smoke and the wild life had well-nigh obliterated the little she knew; but to the name of Jason Lee she held on as to a watchword. Most truly she seems to be one feeling for God’s hand in the darkness.

In thinking of the long past, why is it that the more prominent happenings seem all tinged with sadness? There were bright and beautiful days then, days of long sunshine. The few holidays that frontier life afforded were, by contrast, very keenly enjoyed. Yet if I am to tell of incidents of those early times one might think there was little but doing without things, in common times, varied by the days of sickness and death. “ Not all the preaching since Adam can make of death other than death.” Yet to the new settler it sometimes came in a manner that, with the inevitable home­sickness, no matter how stout-hearted they were, gave an added pang to those who looked on. In September of 1851 I was riding on horseback through the then quite unsettled counties of Polk and Yamhill. Somewhere in the north part of Yamhill County we saw the cabin of a new settler. It might be miles to the next house, and uninviting as the prospect was, we thought it better to beg shelter for the night. My escort rode to the man, who was still with his plough, and I dismounted at the cabin, where two little children, perhaps two and four years of age, were looking at me through the rude fence, and said to them: “ Please tell your mother to come out.” They did not speak, but looked at me. I tried again in what might be the vernacular. “Go call mammy,” but with no better results. I then went in, and, taking them by the hand, said: “Take me where mamma is.” The little thing led me around the house to the other side of the inclosure, and stopped by a new-made grave!

In February, 1855, 1 was going on the steamer Canemah to Oregon City. A very young couple, married that morning, were accompanied by the bride’s mother, a poor widow, who had reached Oregon a year or so before, stripped by death and disaster of every­thing but her children. The oldest daughter, not much over sixteen, was now mar­ried to a youngster, and they were going to the Cascades, where he had work in a saw­mill, and his wife was to cook for the mess. He was a promising looking fellow, and I fully believed the answer that he made to the again bereaved mother, when, with quivering lips, she said: “ Be good to my girl.” The bride had evidently felt that to be truly married she must be attired in what she supposed to be bridal array. All the cash possible had been spent in the thin Swiss dress with its bit laces and ribbons. Her appearance brought a hardly concealed smile to those who were in the cabin, but in that terrible winter rain-storm it was likely to bring worse to her. I began talking with her and when she said it was the first time she was ever on a steamboat, I could easily say, “Then you don’t know what a place it is to take cold, with its hot fires and cold air rushing in when we are obliged to open the doors,” and soon showed her where behind a portiere, the only retirement possible, she could change her thin, open-sleeved gown for something warmer, and at the same time in better accordance with the cus­tom of travelers. 1 became very much interested in their hopes and plans, and it was with a sense of personal bereavement that, the following fall, I read the name of the young husband as being hanged by the Indians in his sawmill, having first witnessed the butchering of his wife.

From the Cascades’ frozen gorges to where the Columbia plunges jubilant to the sea, by many a bright prairie and pleasant valley, they still live who shared in the early, if not the earliest, work cf saving to our country the fair heritage of Oregon. Give them, from your older and richer civilization, a kind, sisterly thought as they sit waiting in the lengthening shadows.