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Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936

"Rewards and Fairies"

So's the puffs out of the pine woods of afternoons.
Come sundown, the frogs strike up, and later on the fireflies
dance in the corn. Oh me, the fireflies in the corn! We were a week
or ten days on the road, tacking from one place to another - such
as Lancaster, Bethlehem-Ephrata - "thou Bethlehem-Ephrata."
No odds - I loved the going about. And so we jogged 'into dozy
little Lebanon by the Blue Mountains, where Toby had a cottage
and a garden of all fruits. He come north every year for this
wonderful Seneca Oil the Seneca Indians made for him. They'd
never sell to any one else, and he doctored 'em with von Swieten
pills, which they valued more than their own oil. He could do
what he chose with them, and, of course, he tried to make them
Moravians. The Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and they'd
had trouble enough from white men - American and English -
during the wars, to keep 'em in that walk. They lived on a
Reservation by themselves away off by their lake. Toby took me
up there, and they treated me as if I was their own blood brother.
Red Jacket said the mark of my bare feet in the dust was just like an
Indian's and my style of walking was similar.


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