THE BRIDGE OF THE GODS.
He came now and looked down upon the body. It had been tightly swathed, fold upon fold, in some oriental fabric; and the wrappings, stiffened by time, still showed what had once been a rare symmetry of form. The face was covered with a linen cloth, yel low now through age and fitting like a mask to the features. The chief knelt down and drew away the face-cloth. The countenance, though shrunken, was almost perfectly preserved. Indeed, so well pre served were many of the corpses the first white set tlers found on these mimaluse islands as to cause at one time a belief that the Indians had some secret process of embalming their dead. There was no such process, however, nothing save the antiseptic prop erties of the ocean breeze which daily fanned the burial islands of the lower Columbia.
Lovely indeed must the mother of Wallulah have been in her life. Withered as her features were, there was a delicate beauty in them still, in the graceful brow, the regular profile, the exquisitely chis elled chin. Around the shoulders and the small shapely head her hair had grown in rich luxuriant masses.
The chief gazed long on the shrunken yet beauti ful face. His iron features grew soft, as none but Wallulah had ever seen them grow. He touched gently the hair of his dead wife, and put it back from her brow with a wistful, caressing tenderness. He had never understood her; she had always been a mystery to him; the harsh savagery of his nature had never been able to enter into or comprehend the refined grace of hers; but he had loved her with all the fierce, tenacious, secretive power of his
