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Then they brought a great pipe full of the strongest tobacco; no man not a magician could have smoked it. And it was passed round: every one smoked; the brothers blew the smoke through their nostrils. But Glooskap filled it full, and, lighting it, burnt all the tobacco to ashes at one pull, and blew all the smoke through his nostrils at one puff. Then the brothers said again in anger, “This is indeed a great magician. Yet he shall be tried again ere he goes, and that bitterly.” But they never said it again.

And they still tried to smoke with him, and the wigwam was closed; they hoped to smother him in smoke, but he sat and puffed away as if he had been on a mountain-top, till they could bear it no longer. And one said, “This is idle; let us go and play at ball.” The place where they were to play was on the sandy plain of Samgadihawk, or Saco, on the bend of the river. [Footnote: I have an Indian stone pestle, or hominy pounder, which I picked up on the site of this ball-play.] And the game begun; but Glooskap found that the ball with which they played was a hideous skull; it was alive and snapped at his heels, and had he been as other men and it had bitten him, it would have taken his foot off. Then Glooskap laughed, and said, “So this is the game you play. Good, but let us all play with our own balls.” So he stepped up to a tree on the edge of the river-bed and broke off the end of a bough, and it turned into a skull ten times more terrible than the other. And the magicians ran before it as it chased them as a lynx chases rabbits; they were entirely beaten. Then Glooskap stamped on the sand, and the waters rose and came rushing fearfully from the mountains adown the river-bed; the whole land rang with their roar. Now Glooskap sang a magic song, which changes all beings, and the three brothers and their father became the chinahmess, a fish which is as long and large as a man, and they went headlong down on the flood, to the deep sea, to dwell there forever. And the magicians had on, each of them, a wampum collar; wherefore the chinahmess has beneath its head, as one may say, round its neck, the wampum collar, as may be seen to this day. And they were mighty m’teoulin in their time; but they were tried before they went, and that bitterly.

Yes, seewass, my brother, this is a true story. For Glus-gah-be was a great man in his day, and the day will come when I shall go to him and see him. [Footnote: This legend is from a single authority, Maria Saksis.]