On the return journey Hiawatha stops at the clever arrow-maker's, who possesses a lovely daughter:
"And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water."
When Hiawatha, in his earliest childhood dreaming, felt the sounds of water and wind press upon his ears, he recognized in these sounds of nature the speech of his mother. The murmuring pine trees on the shore of the great sea, said "Minnewawa." And above the murmuring of the winds and the splashing of the water he found his earliest childhood dreams once again in a woman, "Minnehaha," the laughing water. And the hero, before all others, finds in woman the mother, in order to become a child again, and, finally, to solve the riddle of immortality.
The fact that Minnehaha's father is a skilful arrow-maker betrays him as the father of the hero (and the woman he had with him as the mother). The father of the hero is very often a skilful carpenter, or other artisan. According to an Arabian legend, Tare,[24] Abraham's father, was a skilful master workman, who could carve arrows from any wood; that is to say, in the Arabian form of speech, he was a procreator of splendid sons.[25] Moreover, he was a maker of images of gods. Tvashtar, Agni's father, is the maker of the world, a smith and carpenter, the discoverer of fire-boring. Joseph, the father of Jesus, was also a carpenter; likewise Kinyras, Adonis's father, who is said to have invented
