to no one tribe, but belongs to all tribes, who speaks all tongues, has been sent by the Great Spirit to arouse us.  He has done it.  You know him.  He came from the head of the lake with you, and kept his eye on your scalp.  He has meant to take it from the first.  He waited only for an opportunity.  That opportunity has come, and we now mean to do as he has told us we ought to do.  This is right.  Squaws are in a hurry; warriors know how to wait.  We would kill you at once, and hang your scalp on our pole, but it would not be right We wish to do what is right.  If we are poor Injins, and know but little, we know what is right.  It is right to torment so great a brave, and we mean to do it.  It is only just to you to do so.  An old warrior who has seen so many enemies, and who has so big a heart, ought not to be knocked in the head like a pappoose or a squaw.  It is his right to be tormented.  We are getting ready, and shall soon begin.  If my brother can tell us a new way of tormenting, we are willing to try it.  Should we not make out as well as pale-faces, my brother will remember who we are.  We mean to do our best, and we hope to make his heart soft.  If we do this, great will be our honor.  Should we not do it, we cannot help it.  We shall try.”

It was now the corporal’s turn to put in a rebutter.

This he did without any failure in will or performance.  By this time he was so well warmed as to think or care very little about the saplings, and to overlook the pain they might occasion.

“Dogs can do little but bark; ’specially Injin dogs,” he said.  “Injins themselves are little better than their own dogs.  They can bark, but they don’t know how to bite.  You have many great chiefs here.  Some are panthers, and some bears, and some buffaloes; but where are your weasels?  I have fit you now these twenty years, and never have I known ye to stand up to the baggonet.  It’s not Injin natur’ to do that.”

Here the corporal, without knowing it, made some such reproach to the aboriginal warriors of America as the English used to throw into the teeth of ourselves—­that of not standing up to a weapon which neither party possessed.  It was matter of great triumph that the Americans would not stand the charge of the bayonet at the renowned fight on Breed’s, for instance, when it is well known that not one man in five among the colonists had any such weapon at all to “stand up” with.  A different story was told at Guildford, and Stony Point, and Eutaw, and Bennington, and Bemis’ Heights, and fifty other places that might be named, after the troops were furnished with bayonets.  Then it was found that the Americans could use them as well as others, and so might it have proved with the red men, though their discipline, or mode of fighting, scarce admitted of such systematic charges.  All this, however, the corporal overlooked, much as if he were a regular historian who was writing to make out a case.