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'You have despised a mother-woman. You will suffer evil and starvation and hunger and poverty, oh! foolish tribes-people. Did you not know how great a girl-child is? "That spring, people from a score of tribes came up to the Fraser for the salmon-run. They came great distances from the mountains, the lakes, the far-off dry lands, but not one fish entered the vast rivers of the Pacific Coast.

Now it chanced that Gudruda the Gentle was with child, and when her time came she gave a daughter birth a very fair girl, with dark eyes. On the same day, Groa the witchwoman brought forth a girl-child, and men wondered who was its father, for Groa was no man's wife.

"She was a mother-woman, but save for one beautiful girl-child, her family of six were all boys, splendid, brave boys, too, but this one treasured girl-child they called 'Morning-mist. She was little and frail and beautiful, like the clouds one sees at daybreak circling about the mountain peaks.

It would be more news for Oline to go gadding about with a new building again at Sellanraa. A new wing of the house a new house it was to be. And there were so many now at Sellanraa they had a servant-girl; and Eleseus, he was coming home; and a brand-new little girl-child of their own, just come the old house would be just an extra room now, nothing more.

The girl-child, peering out, sees this forbidden field as belonging wholly to men-kind; and her relation to it is to secure one for herself not only that she may love, but that she may live. He will feed, clothe and adorn her she will serve him; from the subjection of the daughter to that of the wife she steps; from one home to the other, and never enters the world at all man's world.

'The wise men of our coast have said that the girl-child who will some day bear children of her own, will also bring abundance of salmon at her birth; but the boy-child brings to you but himself. "'Let the salmon go," shouted the people, 'but give us a future Great Tyee. Give us the boy-child. "And when the child was born it was a boy. "'Evil will fall upon you, wailed the Great Tyee.

"Why, I like them both, when they're nice; and I'm sorry for them both when they're not." And she added, with a naïve air of confidence: "But I think I like young men better than either, as a rule." The doctor removed his hat again, and sat down. His eyebrows went up, his eyes crinkled. "Miss Alicia Gaines," he said genially, "I perceive you are a girl-child of fine promise.

Our tribe not like yours; we want girl children first; we not always wish boy-child born just for fight. Your people, they care only for war-path; our tribe more peaceful. Very good sign first grandchild to be girl. I tell you why: girl-child may be some time mother herself; very grand thing to be mother." I felt I had caught the secret of her meaning.

But take them civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow.

His faintly smiling glance took in her girl-child slimness in its glittering sheath the zephyr scarf floating from the snow of her bared loveliness her delicate soft chin deliciously lifted as she looked up at him. "How would YOU like it?" he asked. "But I am not a child," in pretty protest. "Children are are different!"