Chibiabos sang so sweetly that the brook would pause in its course and murmur to him, asking him to teach its waves to sing his songs and to flow as softly as his words flowed when he was singing. The envious bluebird begged Chibiabos to teach it songs as wild and wonderful as his own; the robin tried to learn his notes of gladness, and the lonely bird of night, the whippoorwill, longed to sing as Chibiabos sang when he was sad. He could imitate all the noises of the woodland, and make them sound even sweeter than they really were, and by his singing he could force the Indians to laugh or cry or dance, just as he chose. The mighty Kwasind was also much beloved by Hiawatha, who believed that next to wonderful songs and love and wisdom great strength was the finest thing in the world and the closest to perfect goodness; and never, in all the years that men have lived upon the earth, has there been another man so strong as Kwasind. When he was a boy, Kwasind did not fish or play with other children, but seemed very dull and dreamy, and his father and mother thought that they were bringing up a fool. "Lazy Kwasind!" his mother said to him, "you never help me with my work. In the summer you roam through the fields and forests, doing nothing; and now that it is winter you sit beside the fire like an old woman, and leave me to break the ice for fishing and to draw the nets alone. Go out and wring them now, where they are freezing with the water that is in them; hang them up to dry in the sunshine, and show that you are worth the food that you eat and the clothes you wear on your back." Without a word Kwasind rose from the ashes where he was sitting, left the lodge and found the nets dripping and freezing fast. He wrung them like a wisp of straw, but his fingers were so strong that he broke them in a hundred different places, and his strength was so great that he could not help breaking the nets any more than if they were tender cobwebs. "Lazy Kwasind!" his father said to him, "you never help me in my hunting, as other young men help their fathers. You break every bow you touch, and you snap every arrow that you draw. Yet you shall come with me and bring home from the forest what I kill." They went down to a deep and narrow valley by the side of a little brook, where the tracks of bison and of deer showed plainly in the mud; and at last they came to a place where the trunks of heavy trees were piled like a stone wall across the valley. "We must go back," said Kwasind's father; "we can never scale those logs. They are packed so tightly that no woodchuck could get through them, and not even a squirrel could climb over the top," and the old man sat down to smoke and rest and wonder what they were going to do; but before he had finished his pipe the way lay clear, for the strong Kwasind had lifted the logs as if they were light lances, and had hurled them crashing into the depths of the forest.