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Behind these central figures the firelight fell on a solid semicircle of savages, crowns shaved, feathers aslant on the braided lock, and all oiled and painted for war. A chief, wrapped in a blue blanket, stepped out into the circle swinging the carcass of a white dog by the hind-legs. He tied it to a black-birch sapling and left it dangling and turning round and round.

Here and there blackberries grew in the open places, sassafras bushes were plentiful, and black-birch bark was ready for chewing. "Don't you call this nice?" asked Tommy, pausing at last in a little dell where a noisy brook came tumbling down the mountain side, and the pines sung overhead. "Yes; but I'm awful hungry. Let's rest and eat our lunch," said Billy, sitting down on a cushion of moss.

The leaves of the sassafras are full of spice, and the bark of the black-birch twigs holds a fine cordial. Crinkle-root is spicy, but you must partake of it delicately, or it will bite your tongue. Spearmint and peppermint never lose their charm for the palate that still remembers the delights of youth. Wild sorrel has an agreeable, sour, shivery flavour.

My Indians on either flank advanced to the picket line, and squatted there, paying no heed to the challenge of the sentinels, until Boyd was obliged to go forward and satisfy the sullen Pennsylvania soldiery on duty there. He came back in his graceful, swinging stride, chewing a twig of black-birch, his thumbs hooked in his belt, damning all Pennsylvanians for surly dogs.

Through the awful din the three war-cries pealed, the drums advanced, thundering; the iris-maids lighted the six little fires of black-birch, spice-wood, and sassafras, and crouched to inhale the aromatic smoke until, stupefied and quivering in every limb with the inspiration of delirium, they stood erect, writhing, twisting, tossing their hair, chanting the splendors of the future!

She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though there had been some mystic quality in this lustration in running water, performed under the open sky. The racy, black-birch tang still lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this severely washed feeling. It was a taste notably clean.

"Jack," said I, "if there be fresh-baked bread in the regimental ovens yonder, fetch a loaf, in God's name. I could gnaw black-birch and reindeer moss, so famished am I and the Sagamore, too, no doubt, could rattle a flam with a wooden spoon."