Untitled - Smithsonian Institution

olflRKcnTH] THE SWIMMER MANUSCRIPT 143
ctretchcd out in front of him. The grass was of a fine green color,
and felt very soft and nice to walk iii)on.
Soon he saw a building; he entered, and found it filled with children,
some of them mere babies, and none of them any older than about
12 years. ITe asked them where the chief lived; they told him, the
chief lived in the fourth building, and that, if he wished to see him,
he had but to walk through the opened doors of the three first buildings.
He went through the second building and the third, and found
these likewise filled with people, both men and women, but all of
them older than the children he had seen at the first place.
As he came to the fouith building he found the door locked; ho
asked several times for admittance. "Chief, open the door for me."
As ho asked it the fourth time he heard somebody inside turn round
on his chair; then he went in.
There was a white man, very old, with a long white beard, sitting
at a desk. He did not even look up at the visitor, and shook hands
with him without even turning round. lie said: "Well, have you
come to live with us?" T. said he had, upon which the man at the
desk turned round, reached for a big account book and a pen, and
made ready to write T.'s name in the book. But all of a sudden ho
bethought himself: "I think you had better go back home again."
he said; "you will come back here again 33 days from now; then
you will come to stay, and then we will write your name in the book."
He closed the bool-: and put it away.
ile opened a trapdoor and gave T. a small disk-like object, like a
thin sheet of tin, about the size of a silver dollar, and said: "You
had better hold this in your hand, to find your way."
After that T. felt himself, still sitting on his chair, drop through
the trapdoor, and falling at a terrific speed, the air rushing past him
as if it were a windstorm; he soon landed on the top of a mountain
near his settlement; he threw the little disk in front of him and it
started rolling in the direction of his home; he followed it, went into
the cabin, where he found his friends and relatives still gathered, and
stretched himself out on his couch; he then opened his eyes, and
found everybody very nmch relieved, as they had been watching him
carefidly, and had thought him to be dead.
\n both these cases, "the different settlements," the "four different
buildings," nmst surely have some definite meaning. In T.'s account
there would appear to be a differentiation according to age, but this
I suspect to be infiuenced by ill-digested evangelization, as another
informant told me once that "all children under 12 years of age who
die are happy; under 12 they do not know what is wrong."
Incidentally, I want to draw attention to a rather humorous side
of T.'s account: The whole of his visit with God, in an oilice, with
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