Dismay sat upon every guilty face, and a sullen gloom enshrouded every heart. The tribe finding it useless to bury deeper the bodies of their slain kinsmen now began to build over them—but every night one of their number disappeared, and in the morning his fleshless bones were found tied to the fatal stake; and still the heads rose, but every day there was one less than before. Then the dreadful truth flashed upon them that one of their own number must die in that fearful manner, for every one of the Wannamoisetts they had slain. As the number of their dead increased, which it did by one for every midnight hour, so did the number of spectre heads diminish. One murdered spirit was every night appeased, and appeared no more. Still they kept on building that huge pile, and the dreadful occupation to which they clung as affording the only ray of hope that they might be delivered before their turn should come round, so wrought upon the guilty ones that they soon became almost as ghostly as the phantoms of the night which tortured them. But they faltered not in their task. Every day the heads were covered and every morning they were found in sight. And on the seventieth morning that mound was far higher than it now stands. There was then but one head remaining, for just seventy of the Wannamoisetts had been slain and just seventy were the murderers. At midnight of that day the strange revel was, for the last time, visible, for when the skeleton of Mononton, the last and most bloody of the fratricides was found, the last head had disappeared forever. The remainder of the tribe left soon after in search of a more auspicious residence. Since the treacherous act of their brethren, famine had weakened them and the terrible plague laid many of their forest children low. But wherever they wandered, the curse of the Great Spirit followed them, and they dwindled away until finally there was no place left for them on the earth. One fair evening in the next summer, two forms sat upon the very mound which forms the principal subject of this tale. One was a female of fairy proportions, and she looked abroad over the landscape with the eye of one to whom its beauties were familiar. Her companion’s face was buried in his hands, and his whole frame shook as if the recollection of some terrible scene were passing over his memory. And as the eye of Noalwa rested on him she, too, divining his thoughts, shuddered, saying, “Mononchee! let us go hence, never again to return! I cannot bear to look upon these scenes where my people lived and where yours so sadly perished. These trees that we have planted around the mound which covers them will bear witness that their memory is still dear to us. Let us go, Mononchee!”