For a moment saw the starlight; XX. THE FAMINE O THE long and dreary Winter! In the snow beheld no footprints, Fell, and could not rise from weakness, O the famine and the fever! All the earth was sick and famished ; Hungry was the air around them, Hungry was the sky above them, And the hungry stars in heaven Like the eyes of wolves glared at them! Into Hiawatha's wigwam Came two other guests, as silent As the ghosts were, and as gloomy, Did not parley at the doorway, At the face of Laughing Water. And the foremost said: "Behold me! I am Famine, Bukadawin!” And the other said: "Behold me! I am Fever, Ahkosewin!" And the lovely Minnehaha Shuddered as they looked upon her, At the looks they cast upon her, Wrapped in furs and armed for hunting, With his mighty bow of ash-tree, On his snow-shoes strode he forward. Cried he with his face uplifted (( Give your children food, O father! Through the far-resounding forest, But there came no other answer All day long roved Hiawatha In that melancholy forest, Through the shadow of whose thickets, In the pleasant days of Summer, He had brought his young wife homeward When the birds sang in the thickets, And the streamlets laughed and glistened, And the air was full of fragrance, And the lovely Laughing Water Said with voice that did not tremble, "I will follow you, my husband!" In the wigwam with Nokomis, With those gloomy guests, that watched her, With the Famine and the Fever, She was lying, the Beloved, She the dying Minnehaha. "Hark!" she said; "I hear a rushing, Hear a roaring and a rushing, "No, my child!" said old Nokomis, "Look!" she said; "I see my father Standing lonely at his doorway, Beckoning to me from his wigwam In the land of the Dacotahs!" "No, my child!" said old Nokomis, ""Tis the smoke, that waves and beckons !" "Ah!" she said, "the eyes of Pauguk Glare upon me in the darkness, I can feel his icy fingers Clasping mine amid the darkness! And the desolate Hiawatha, Miles away among the mountains, Over snow-fields waste and pathless, Empty-handed, heavy-hearted, Would that I had perished for you, And he rushed into the wigwam, Lying dead and cold before him, That the forest moaned and shuddered, |