One can scarcely imagine a finer device for Virginia to have adopted than that of the Indian maiden protecting the white man from the tomahawk.  But, alas! with the departure of Smith the soul seems to have left the Colony.  The beautiful lands became a prey to the worn-out English gentry, who spent their time cheating the simple-hearted red men.  These called themselves gentlemen, because they could do nothing.  In a classification of seventy-eight persons at Jamestown we are informed that there were “four carpenters, twelve laborers, one blacksmith, one bricklayer, one sailor, one barber, one mason, one tailor, one drummer, one chirurgeon, and fifty-four gentlemen.”  To this day there seems to be a large number in that vicinity who have no other occupation than that of being gentlemen, and it is evidently in many cases just as much as they can do.

When Pocahontas died, the last link was broken between the Indian and the settler.  Unprovoked wars of extermination were begun to dispossess these children of Nature of the very breasts of their mother, which had sustained them so long and so peacefully.  For a century the Indian’s name for Virginian was “Longknife.”  The very missionaries robbed him with one hand whilst baptizing him with the other.  One story concerning the missionaries strikes us as sufficiently characteristic of the wit of the Indian and the temper of the period to be preserved.  There was a branch of the Catawbas on the Potomac, in which river are to be found the best shad in the world.  The missionaries who settled among this tribe taught them that it would be a good investment in their soul-assurance to catch large quantities of the shad for them, the missionaries.  The Indians earnestly set themselves to the work; their reverend teachers taking the fish and sending them off secretly to various settlements in Virginia and Maryland, and making thereby large sums of money.  The Indians worked on for several months without receiving any compensation, and the missionaries were getting richer and richer,—­when by some means the red men discovered the trick, and routed the holy men from their neighborhood.  Many years afterward the Catholics made an effort to establish a mission with this same tribe.  The priest who first addressed them took as his text, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters,”—­and went on in figurative style to describe the waters of life.  When the sermon was ended, the Indians held a council to consider what they had just heard, and finally sent three of their number to the missionaries, who said, “White men, you speak in fine words of the waters of life; but before we decide on what we have heard, we wish to know whether any shad swim in those waters.”