Joseph," she added, with a smile, " or else thought me a weak and foolish woman. But all that we can settle hereafter. Thank God that I have found you; and that you are, to all appearances, out of danger."

Aunt Prudence looked into Kate's face, and saw that tears were on her cheeks.

"Would you have loved him less, Kate," she asked, "if he had been your husband?"

"He would have been the same to me whatever might have been his calling. That could not have changed him."

business and returned to the East with thirty thousand dollars in cash. This handsome capital enabled him to get into an old and well established mercantile house as partner, where he remained until his death. About the time of his return to the East, you, Kate, were born."

"I!" ejaculated the astonished girl.

"Yes. Their two older children died while they were in Louisville, and you, their third child, were born about six months before they left." "I!" repeated Kate, in the same surprised tone of voice.

"Yes, dear, you! I have given you a history of your own father and mother. So, as you are the daughter of a tailor, you must not object to a tailor for a husband, if he be the right kind of man."

It may very naturally be supposed that Kate had but little to say against tailors after that, although we are by no means sure that she had any intention of becoming the bride of one.

Он yes, Mr. Bartlett, all very pretty and picturesque-on paper. Your wigwam may pass for a not uncomfortable dwelling, at any rate in the pleasant summer time, snugly planted there just in the edge of some great American forest in which, as John Neal says, half the nations of Europe might hide themselves from each other, with its waving foliage to screen the dwellers from the too ardent approaches of the sun, its almost impenetrable recesses to serve them as cool retreats from sultriness when mere waving foliage will not serve, and its wild denizens to replenish their larders when the copper colored gourmands are tired of eating fish. The bark canoe, too, is a pretty thing enough in its way, either to look at or to paddle about in. And to the worn imagination of the civilized human, weary of idling or toiling, day after day and year after year, among long rows of quadrangular structures in monotonous brick or brown freestone, there is abundance of captivation in the careless independence of the red man's existence-going where he lists, courting society or solitude as caprice alone may prompt, and untrammelled by any necessity of labor or exertion, for the public or private weal, beyond that of now and then spearing a salmon or driving an arrow through the sides of a deer or a buffalo; which we are apt to consider no more than a pastime. And the costume of the "varmints" is picturesque enough, too-in a picture; though it must be admitted that, to the sophisticated taste of one brought up in civilized society, the arrangement of the hair at least might be improved a trifle by some such fantastic substitution as a braid or two, or even a few corkscrew ringlets-not to insist upon a Grecian knot for the women or a Brutus crop for the masculines.

The Indian novelists-not meaning red men who write novels but white novelists who have taken red men for their heroes or other characters -have presented the Indian character and Indian manner of life to us, on the whole, in a somewhat attractive aspect. Though breaking holes into the skulls and tearing away the scalps of helpless women and children are not, to our notions, very dignifying employments-though we can perceive no particular chivalry in knocking out the brains of sleeping men, or shooting a poor fellow down from an ambush still there are various traits in the Indian character, as it has been described for us

by the novelists aforesaid, which command a certain degree of respect, not to say admiration. We have been taught to believe them faithful in friendship, though full of treachery as foes; of almost superhuman endurance in suffering, eloquent in speech after their own fashion, strangely compounding the figurative, the impassioned and the sententious, stoically simple in regard to the indulgence of appetite-except when " drink" comes in their way-and indomitable as the noblest Roman that ever put on a toga-which by the way was not much unlike a Mackinaw blanket-in their devotion to freedom. In short, we have been politely requested to look upon them as a race possessing some qualities hateful but none mean or disgusting; simple, austere, self-denying and capable of noble impulses, if in some things cruel, barbarous and bloody.

We take leave to say, in the most emphatic phrase, that we do not believe a word of it. We have seen no small number of Indians, representatives of many tribes and exhibiting the Indian character under almost every class of influences, and it comes from our pen with the weight of thorough conviction that, take them as a race, they are no more worthy of respect or admiration than the least elevated tribes of Africa, or of the islands in the Pacific. Good natural qualities, susceptible of culture and development to very respectable stages of personal character, it is not intended to deny to them; we have seen and known educated red men whom it was impossible to know without respecting; but what we mean to say is, that except where the influence of a civilized education has been exerted, except where the red man has been subjected to the same agencies which elevate the white, there is nothing in the character, condition, habits or capabilities of the red man, which the white has any occasion to emulate. Take them in what the novelists are pleased to call their best estate, remote from contact with white civilization, and they are lazy, dirty, selfish, deceitful, gluttonous, covetous, ignorant and foolish, like all other savages. Their personal filthiness is excessive; and this alone, whether in red men or in white, is a proof of excessive demoralization. Their laziness and selfishness are proved by the well known fact that they make their women do all the work, even to the extent of bringing home the game that has