As it grew late, and the crowded population began to disappear, I too walked across the village to the lodge of my host, Kongra-Tonga.  As I entered I saw him, by the flickering blaze of the fire in the center, reclining half asleep in his usual place.  His couch was by no means an uncomfortable one.  It consisted of soft buffalo robes laid together on the ground, and a pillow made of whitened deerskin stuffed with feathers and ornamented with beads.  At his back was a light framework of poles and slender reeds, against which he could lean with ease when in a sitting posture; and at the top of it, just above his head, his bow and quiver were hanging.  His squaw, a laughing, broad-faced woman, apparently had not yet completed her domestic arrangements, for she was bustling about the lodge, pulling over the utensils and the bales of dried meats that were ranged carefully round it.  Unhappily, she and her partner were not the only tenants of the dwelling, for half a dozen children were scattered about, sleeping in every imaginable posture.  My saddle was in its place at the head of the lodge and a buffalo robe was spread on the ground before it.  Wrapping myself in my blanket I lay down, but had I not been extremely fatigued the noise in the next lodge would have prevented my sleeping.  There was the monotonous thumping of the Indian drum, mixed with occasional sharp yells, and a chorus chanted by twenty voices.  A grand scene of gambling was going forward with all the appropriate formalities.  The players were staking on the chance issue of the game their ornaments, their horses, and as the excitement rose, their garments, and even their weapons, for desperate gambling is not confined to the hells of Paris.  The men of the plains and the forests no less resort to it as a violent but grateful relief to the tedious monotony of their lives, which alternate between fierce excitement and listless inaction.  I fell asleep with the dull notes of the drum still sounding on my ear, but these furious orgies lasted without intermission till daylight.  I was soon awakened by one of the children crawling over me, while another larger one was tugging at my blanket and nestling himself in a very disagreeable proximity.  I immediately repelled these advances by punching the heads of these miniature savages with a short stick which I always kept by me for the purpose; and as sleeping half the day and eating much more than is good for them makes them extremely restless, this operation usually had to be repeated four or five times in the course of the night.  My host himself was the author of another most formidable annoyance.  All these Indians, and he among the rest, think themselves bound to the constant performance of certain acts as the condition on which their success in life depends, whether in war, love, hunting, or any other employment.  These “medicines,” as they are called in that country, which are usually communicated in dreams, are often absurd enough.  Some Indians will strike