nerves.

multuous, scarcely now stirred his pulse. She was a thing of beams-silvery and clear :-a warm, lustrous light clung around her limbs, and showed their delicate outline. She floated on the air, her wings and figure waving with its eddies, like the shadow of a Lee-ka-loo bird on the sea; her eyes, deep as the fathomless blue heaven, looked down on him with pity and gentleness unutterable. It was a marvellous work the over-daring Yashan had accomplished. Beautiful, exceedingly, was that mute form, and rarely exquisite its finish! Must that glorious mechanism be destroyed, and all the noble purpose of its framing lost? No! she moves her tiny pearl-like hand above it, and every blotch and all the bruises disappear, and it was fair to view, and perfect as when Yahshan had given it the last touch. Now she stooped beside and touched him-white sparks flew up, and she sang a low song; at the first note, the dark, formless masses round them quivered and rocked. The Wako smiled, for feeling now first thrilled along his The song rose-the dumb things shook and stirred the more. She touched his nostrils and his lips-the sparks played between her small fingers, and danced up. Yet a louder note swelled out, and the thick mists swayed and curled, and a cool wind rushed through them and dashed a stream of odors on his face. He drew long breaths, and sighed with the burden of delight, and moved his lips to inarticulate joy. And now that wondrous song pealed out clear, ringing bursts, that shook the blue arch, and swung the fire-boats cadent with its gushes; and through the dim mists great shapes, like rocks and trees, leaped to the measure, marshaling in lines and order. Now she pressed his eyelids with her fingers the silver sparks sprung in exulting showers, snapping and bursting with sweet smells. Once more, pealing triumphant, a keen, shining flood, that symphony poured wilder forth; his eyes fly open, and that heavy mist, like a great curtain, slowly rises. First, the green grass and the flowers, bending heneath the gentle breeze, turn their deep eyes and spotted cups towards him in salutation, and all the creeping things and birds that love the low herbs, dewbesprent, are there; and as the mist goes up majestically slow, other forms of bird and beast are seen; and dark trunks of mighty trees and great stems beside them, looking like trees, until his eye has trac

ed them up to the great Moose, the Bighorned Stag, the Grizzly Bear and the vast, moving Mammoth. But then it has drank in the harmony of grades; for all are there; and side by side he marks how from the crawler every step ascends in beautiful gradation; the last linked to the first in one all-perfect chain. Then came the knotted limbs, with their burden of green leaves, and, underneath, the round yellow fruits, or purple-flushing of rich clusters and gay forms that flutter through them on wings of amethyst, or flame, or gold, their every movement a music note, though all were dumb to him as yet. Still higher the mist-curtain goes, and the grey cliffs with shining peaks, and a proud, fierce-eyed bird perched on them, meet his gaze, and then the mists float far away and scatter into clouds, and all the splendor and the pomp of the thronged earth, is spread a gorgeous but voiceless revelation to his new being. With every touch of the Enchantress, Ah-i-wee-o, the soul of chaos had passed into a sense; and all the pleasant harmonies the Wako felt, and all the scented harmonies the Wako tasted and inhaled-all the thoughts of harmony in grand or graceful forms the Wako saw-that blissful interpenetration gave conception to, and the magic of that powerful song brought forth! One more act, and his high marriage to Eternity is consummated; ecstacy has found a voice, and all these harmonies articulation! Yet his ears were sealed, and though music flowed in through every other sense, his dumb lips strove in vain to wake its language.

But this was the supremest gift of all. This was the charm that had drawn beauty out of chaos-the magic by which Ah-i-wee-o ruled in Spirit Land, and chained the powers of evil. It was death to spirits less than she, to hear the fierce crashing of those awful symphonies she knew. His nature could not bear the revelation. Besides, what had he to do with that celestial minstrelsy which led the heaven-fires on their rounds. There was ambition, full enough, up there; and Yahshan had been playing far too rashly on those burning keys. She would not curse this perfect being with a gift too high, and add another daring rebel to her realm. No! He must be ruler here, as she ruled every thing. From all these harmonies he must extract the tone, and on it weave his song of power to lead them captive. This divine music is the voice of all the beautiful, the higher language of every

One of them was fair, white as the milkwhite Fawn that licked her hand, and gazed up at her musical lips. But her hair was dark, and a strong light gleamed in her small black eyes. This was Kike-wee; she sung and laughed, and kissed the song-bird's bill that perched upon her finger, and when he tried to follow her wild carol, she mocked his blunders, and stamped her tiny foot, and frowned, and laughed, and warbled yet a wilder symphony, to puzzle him the more. The other was a darker maiden, with large gentle eyes. This was Mnemoia; her voice was soft and low, and she sung sweet songs, and looked full of love and patience. The Wako half rose, in joy and wonder. They bounded towards him, sang a rapturous roundelay to a'giddy, whirling dance, then threw their arms about his neck and kissed him. They became his squaws, and Yahshu smiled upon them as she sailed by that night.

The Wako was very happy, and Kike-wee was his favorite. She was very lovely, but full of curious whims, that each day became more odd. She loved the Blue Jay most among the birds, and taught him all his antics; and the Magpie was a pet; and the passionate, bright Hummer lived about her lips. As yet, nothing but sounds and scenes of love were in that little world; and the strong, terrible brutes knew not they had passions or the taste for blood; but Ki-ke-wee would stand before the Grizzly Bear and pull his jaws, and switch his fierce eyeballs, until he learned to growl with pain, and then she would mock him; and when he growled louder, she would mock him still, until at last he raved with rage, and leaped upon the Panther-for he feared Kike-wee's eye-and the Panther tasted blood, and sprang to the battle fiercely. And now the tempest broke, and every thing with claws and fangs howled in the savage discord. Ki-ke-wee clapped her hands and laughed. Mnemoia raised the enchantment of her song above it all, and it was stilled. Then Ki-ke-wee would tease the Eagle, and mock him till he screamed and dashed at the Black Vulture in his rage; and she would dance and shout for joy; and Mnemoia would

quell it, then go aside to weep. The Wako loved the beautiful witch, and when he plead with her she would mock even him; and every day, and every hour, this mocking elf stirred some new passion, until at last even Mnemoia's song had lost its charm, and the Bear sulked in the deep thickets, and shook them with his growl, and the Panther moaned from out the forest, and the gaunt wolves snapped their white teeth and howled; and all the timid things fled away from these fierce voices; and battle, and blood, and death were rife where love and peace had been. The birds scattered in affright, and sung their new songs by snatches only, and hateful sounds of deadly passions, and the screams and wails of fear, resounded everywhere.

Ki-ke-wee made a bow, and poisoned the barbed arrow, and mocked the deathbleat of the milk-white Fawn, when the Wako shot it at her tempting. This was too much! Ah-i-wee-o cursed her, and she fell. The Wako knelt over her, and wept; and when the dissolving spasm seemed upon her, he covered his face with his hands, and wailed aloud. A voice just above him wailed too! He looked up, surprised;-a strange bird, with graceful form and sharp, black, spiteful eyes, was mocking him! He looked down-Ki-ke-wee was gone; and the strange bird gaped its long bill, hissing at him; and when it spread its wings, to bound up from the twig, in an ecstacy of passion, he knew, by the broad white stripe across them, that it was Ki-ke-wee!

He found the neglected Mnemoia weeping in the forest; and, soon after, they scaled the cliffs, and fled from that fair land, to hide from Ki-ke-wee. But she has followed, and mocks their children yet; and we dare not slay her, for the wise men think she was a daughter of the evil spirits that poured the green fluid in the Wako's throat, and the same bad fire burns yet in our veins. Our hunters, chasing the mountain goat, sometimes look from the bluffs into that lovely vale that lies in the bosom of the Rocky Mountain chain, but they never venture to go down!

PICTURE to yourself a race, in their physique magnificent, affording breathing models for the sculptor, of severe and noble beauty, with faces instinct with the light man only exhibits in a state of personal as well as civil liberty, stately and dignified, not bent down with the burdens of labor, but with all the faculties kindled and kept alive by habits of perpetual exercise. Picture to yourself such a race, possessing one of the most beautiful countries upon which the sun ever looked-vast prairies, undulating and fertile, interspersed with groves, and divided by clear, deep streams-and you will have formed a not inapt idea of the character and condition of the present remoter tribes of the North American Indians, as well as of those that centuries ago possessed the entire continent. The prairies they inhabit are filled with deer, and bisected by the annual route of the buffalo, from the sierras of California to the vast plains that give birth to the rivers emptying into Hudson's Bay, and back again, with the winter, to the sunny plains of Texas and Soñora. The antelope and the elk are found in the level lands, and the beaver inhabits the clear, cold streams among the hills. Herds of wild horses, compared to which the famed droves of Tartary are small, bound over the unlimited and unclaimed fields.

To imagine that a people so situated should have a complex policy, would be contrary to the dictate of reason; for, accustomed as they are, at the promptings of fancy, to wander off from the body of the tribe and bury themselves among the solitudes of the Rocky Mountains, they are of course impatient, on their return, of the restraints of society; and as their habit of wandering is not, as with us, the exception but the universal rule, the laws of their unwritten code are adapted to it. Simple, indeed, is this code. To come to the council when it is convened, and attend to its deliberations with austere dignity to follow and obey the chief in war, and to receive implicitly the customs of their fathers before them-constitute all its requirements. Offences against the persons of their brethren are the only ones known to them, and are always punished by the lex talionis. It murder is committed, the kinsmen of the

sufferer decide upon the atonement, and may either entirely remit or modify it. All other offences are as simply decided upon. Of religion, as a system, they are ignorant; believing in a great and good Spirit who rules all things for the good of man. Each one, upon this fundamental idea, builds up a religion for himself; and in the stillness of the quiet woods and prairies, and by the rivers and solemn lakes, pours out his voiceless orisons to the Beneficence which made the happy hunting grounds, where deer are plentiful as kine in the lands of the palefaces, where wild vines cover the uncultured soil with fruit, and honey is laid up for them in the clefts of the trees. They are not, however, without a positive worship, for the writer of this has seen, more than once, members of the wild tribes lying in the tall grass, wet with dew and drooping above them, singing their own simple and uncouth, yet heart-felt hymns, in tones an Indian alone

can utter.

Simple in their habits and wants, the skins of the deer and elk supply their moccasin, and the soft robe of the buffalo, their garb of luxury. Pigments obtained from the veins of colored clay, left bare by the torrents, and from the juices of the wood berries, constitute all the refinements of their toilet; and the belt of wampum and gaudy beads, or pieces of shell and stone pierced with patient skill, the jewels of their gala dress. From the horn of the elk and a wood peculiar to the country they inhabit, bearing a fruit like the apples of the Dead Sea, are fashioned their bows, and from the cane which is the growth of the low-lands upon their streams, the lance and arrow, deadly in their hands as the rifle's ball.

They have not, as we have said, the laws of a complex civilisation, because they need them not. Having nothing to tempt the cupidity of their neighbors, theft is rarely known among them, for it is as easy to obtain the bow and quiver from the forest amid which they dwell, as from the wigwam of their fellows; and there could be no natural depravity deep enough to induce them surreptitiously to obtain the means of life in a country abounding with all their simplicity of living makes desirable. They

know little of the sweet influences of domestic life, because women, with them, are in a manner slaves, and the warrior thinks not of telling his troubles to his wife, or of conversing with her upon anything that interests him. For these reasons society with the Indians, without this most attaching cord, is but a rope of sand, and an Indian nation always assumes the appearance of a fortuitous assemblage gathered by interest, as vultures are by the scent of prey, or the weaker members of the animal kingdom, by the necessity of defence. As we see a troop of the wild prairie horse governing their motions by the example of the most powerful stallion among them, the Indians, in their hours of danger, have ever obeyed the motions of some superior man, who, placing himself at their head, entirely superceded, for the time at least, their hereditary chiefs, and has been obeyed, they knew not why, by right of the power which mind exerts over grosser organizations, until a new emergency should call forth a new hero. Thus it is easy enough to find an exemplification, that in each man who is obeyed in dangerous conjunctures, there resides the kenning or cunning, or capacity which is the only right divine to power, and which is acknowledged always in every community-and that even in the heroes of savage tribes, there is a truth and reality which they partake with the great men who have modified the events of whatever has become history, and fashioned creeds which will be the rule of action somewhere long after their names are forgotten.

They have priests, and medicine-men, and sooth-sayers, quite as much given to mummery and deceit as any who have been the mode in the most civilized communities. In some respects, their medicine-men are better than ours -they take no fees, and their drugs are not very noisome. The bark and root of the sassafras and the seneca, and some mucilaginous plant-the bark, perhaps, of the Ornus Fraxinus-constitute the most of their pharmacopæia; add to these an exorcism, to cure the wind, and an invocation to Manito, to expel the shaking spirit from one stricken with the ague.

A mode of writing, too, they have, very graphically described by Dr. Robertson, and simple as the rest of their arts. Three blows with a hatchet, and the bark of the Populus Americanus, or

Tulip Tree, is loosened and stripped off, and figures traced here and there-pictures without light and shade-chronicle the valiant emprizes, and preserve the memory of good blows struck by famous Sachems, until the bark has grown over the wounded trunk again. There will stand the tree, and for two hundred years, perhaps, its scars show that it commemorates something. The obelisks and pyramids of the Pharaohs. can do nothing more distinct, and quite long enough they preserve the clear story-some three years; for the Duke of Wellington, in but little more than that time after the battle of Waterloo, was pelted by the mob of London.

Of civilization, these prairie tribes know but little, and that little they have learned from two sources. The first was from the monks of the Society of Jesus, not a few of whom had been in other days soldiers, carbonari, men of adventurous lives, who had sighed away their youth unavailingly in hopes for the redemption of their own land, and now, grown hopeless for that, had become enthusiastic for the ultimate salvation of the red wanderers of the New World. Had the Indians no other tutors than such as these, their course would be onward. But other pale-faces, men of the huckster genus, who would sell the bones of their fathers if they could find a purchaser, have insinuated themselves among them, and dealing out deadly poison, sow physical and moral death around all who traffic with them, and make useless the labor of the old soldier, turned herald of the cross. Show us an Indian hamlet of fifty houses, or tents, and we will show you a trader, who purchases from its inhabitants the produce of their hunt for a trifle, and, in spite of non-intercourse laws, pays for it in whisky, or, as the Indian calls it, fire-water.

Such are the wild tribes now; good haters, therefore good lovers, with a fair capacity for being made true men offor as well might we call the babe in swaddling-clothes a man, as give the name to a being undeveloped in his mental faculties. Such, however, thus slightly sketched, are those tribes now; and such were another portion of the red race, whose present condition we seek breifly to lay before the public.

Tall and stalwart, perhaps, as their brethren in the prairie, are the remnant of the once mighty tribes whose homes on each side of the Alleghany have been