When but a little girl one of my greatest delights was to sit at the feet of my maternal grandfather and listen to the tales of the olden times. Grandfathers and grandmothers always love to tell stories, and boys and girls love to hear them. Our grandparents were not the only ones that enjoyed telling stories of the great past; Indians also related many things to their children of what had happened in the long ago. But as the red men had no books in which to record these happenings, some of their stories may be of real incidents and a great deal may be purely imaginary, for we know the Indian was always very superstitious. [Illustration: The Indians loved to tell stories to their children.] There is a story told by the Lenni-Lenape Indians, who lived in eastern United States, that their ancestors in the very earliest times were mere animals living underground. One of them accidentally found a hole by which he came to the surface of the ground, and soon the whole tribe followed. These Indians believed that they gradually became human beings; so in remembrance of their ancestors, they chose such names as "Black Bear," "Black Hawk," "Red Horse," and "Sitting Bull." Some of the tribes believing in this tradition would not eat any underground animals like the rabbit, ground hog, and ground squirrel, for fear they would be eating their kinsmen. Another very interesting tradition told by these Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, is that these ancestors came from west of the Mississippi and that when they tried to cross this stream the right of passage was disputed by a powerful force called the Alligewi, from whose name we get the word Allegheny. Being determined to cross this mighty stream and move eastward, the Lenni-Lenape joined with the Mengwe (Iroquois) in a war upon the Alligewi, overcame them, and almost exterminating them, drove the remnant of their tribe entirely from the country. General G.R. Clark, Colonel McKee, and Colonel James Moore at different times and places were told by Indians, among them the noted chiefs "Cornstalk" and "Tobacco," that before the red men came to Kentucky--named from Ken-tuck-ee, meaning in Indian language, "the river of Blood"--a white race, superior in many arts and crafts unknown to the red men, the builders of the many forts, and the inhabitants of the vast burying grounds, had been besieged by the early Indians in a great battle near the Falls of the Ohio. The remnant was driven into a small island below these rapids, where the entire race was "cut to pieces."