were a man and a chief, but you are not, you are nothing but an old woman.  Leave this house, and never enter it again.’  Mr. B. said he expected the Indian would attempt his life when he said this, but that he had placed himself in a position so that he could defend himself, and looked straight into the Indian’s eye, and, like other wild beasts, he quailed before the glance of mental and moral courage.  He calmed down at once, and soon began to make apologies.  Mr. B. then told him kindly, but firmly, that, if he wished to walk in the same path with him, he must walk as straight as the crack on the floor before them; adding, that he would not walk with anybody who would jostle him by walking so crooked as he had done.  He was perfectly tamed, and Mr. B. said he never had any more trouble with him.”

The conviction here livingly enforced of the superiority on the side of the white man, was thus expressed by the Indian orator at Mackinaw while we were there.  After the customary compliments about sun, dew, &c., “This,” said he, “is the difference between the white and the red man; the white man looks to the future and paves the way for posterity.  The red man never thought of this.”  This is a statement uncommonly refined for an Indian; but one of the gentlemen present, who understood the Chippewa, vouched for it as a literal rendering of his phrases; and he did indeed touch the vital point of difference.  But the Indian, if he understands, cannot make use of his intelligence.  The fate of his people is against it, and Pontiac and Philip have no more chance than Julian in the times of old.

The Indian is steady to that simple creed which forms the basis of all his mythology; that there is a God and a life beyond this; a right and wrong which each man can see, betwixt which each man should choose; that good brings with it its reward, and vice its punishment.  His moral code, if not as refined as that of civilized nations, is clear and noble in the stress laid upon truth and fidelity.  And all unprejudiced observers bear testimony, that the Indians, until broken from their old anchorage by intercourse with the whites,—­who offer them, instead, a religion of which they furnish neither interpretation nor example,—­were singularly virtuous, if virtue be allowed to consist in a man’s acting up to his own ideas of right.

My friend, who joined me at Mackinaw, happened, on the homeward journey, to see a little Chinese girl, who had been sent over by one of the missionaries, and observed that, in features, complexion, and gesture, she was a counterpart to the little Indian girls she had just seen playing about on the lake shore.