“It is even so, young man,” responded the hunter, rousing himself from the reverie into which he also seemed to have fallen at the departure of his fair favorite; “it is even so; but, for all that, the very flower of all the womankind, white or red, according to my ideas, that ever graced the borders of these lakes.” “But how came she by those neatly-turned English features, and that clear, white complexion?” “Why, her mother, who is now dead, was an uncommon handsome woman for a squaw, and had, as I perhaps should have qualified when I answered so about this girl, some white blood in her veins; or rather had, as the old chief once told me, somewhere away back among the gone-by generations, a female ancestor, a pure white woman, who was made captive by the Indians, and married into their tribe, and who was as handsome as a picture. But the white blood seemed to have been pretty much lost among the descendants, till the appearance of this nonsuch of a girl, in whom every drop of it seemed to have again been collected.” “Some might, perhaps, draw different conclusions in the case.” “Yes, and draw them very wrongfully, too, as I have no doubt many people do in such cases; for I have often noticed it among families, and ascertained it as a fact, that where a person of particular looks and character once lived, his or her like, though not coming out visibly in any of the descendants for a long time, is sure sooner or later to appear, and so will frequently leap out in a child four or five generations off; a complete copy, in looks, blood, and character, of the original (as far as can be judged from family tradition), who may have been dead an hundred years. This is my notion; and I hold that every person is destined to be at least once reproduced among some of his descendants. I, or the exact like of me, will likely enough be seen in some of my blood descendants, fifty or an hundred years hence, building dams or mills on these very falls, or even riding in a carriage around these wild lakes, where I have spent nearly my whole life in hunting moose, and the other wild animals known only in the unbroken forest.” “Your theory may be true, but it does not quite account, I think, for the evident intelligence and culture of this remarkable girl. To appear and converse as she does, she must have seen considerable of good society out of the forest, and, I should think, schools.”