And where
the radiant moose-flowers grow thickest, screened from the view of the
cabin by a few cedars and balsams, are the rough wooden slabs that mark
seven graves. Six of them are the graves of children--little ones who
died deep in the wilderness and whose tiny bodies Meleese Cummins could
not leave to the savage and pitiless loneliness of the forests, but whom
she has brought together that they might have company in what she calls
her, "Little Garden of God."
Those little graves tell the story of Meleese--the woman who, all heart
and soul, has buried her own one little babe in that garden of flowers.
One of the slabs marks the grave of an Indian baby, whose little dead
body Meleese Cummins carried to her cabin in her own strong arms from
twenty miles back in the forest, when the temperature was fifty degrees
below zero. Another of them, a baby boy, a French half-breed and his wife
brought down from fifty miles up the Reindeer and begged "L'ange Meleese"
to let it rest with the others, where "it might not be lonely and would
not be frightened by the howl of the wolves." It was a wild and half
Indian mother who said that!
It was almost twenty years ago that the romance began in the lives of
John and Meleese Cummins. Meleese was then ten years old; and she still
remembers as vividly as though they were but memories of yesterday the
fears and wild tales of that one terrible winter when the "Red
Terror"--the smallpox--swept in a pitiless plague of death throughout the
northern wilderness.
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