suitor the beautiful girl said no, until young Dr. Whitman came riding like Lochinvar out of the West.
It was the Sabbath when Dr. Whitman reached his native village in central New York, from his first exploring tour to the Rocky Mountains. In the midst of the sermon, he whom they thought thousands of miles away, walked inta church, followed by two tall, blanketed Indians.
"Marcus!" cried his mother, rising from her pew and stretching forth her arms. "Marcus!" echoed the heart of a maid in the village choir. In a few days there was a wedding at the old-fashioned house of Judge Prentice. There was a missionary farewell at the village church. Long after, it was a tradition in that village that when the choir broke down in sobs, the sweet soprano of Narcissa Whitman, the missionary bride, carried the farewell hymn alone, like a skylark to the sky:
Holy days and Sabbath bell,
Richest, brightest, sweetest treasure,
Can I say a last farewell?"
They started. Cincinnati was a village in the woods; Chicago, unknown; St. Louis, the end of the West. Oregon was foreign land in 1836.
"You can never get the women through," said Catlin, the Indian artist, at Pittsburg. "They will both be kidnapped," said old trappers on the border. "They are white squaws, white as snow," was the word that flew from tribe to tribe as, under the convoy of the American Fur Company, they entered the great, wild land of the West. For miles the enraptured Indians followed in silent admiration.
"This is the end of the wagon route," said the fur-
